04.14.24: Pre-race walk

Keeneland, the historic race track in Lexington, Ky., is in the middle of its annual spring meet.

The track hosts two racing meets a year — a three-week spring meet in April and a three-week fall meet in October. For years we attended a day of racing each meet. It’s something I always looked forward to and it always triggered memories. When I was young I would go to Keeneland with my father. As we both got older, I’d take my father. And in recent years my wife and I would attend — until COVID and the accompanying restrictions broke our long string of visits.

Keeneland is very photo friendly, unlike some other sport sites. Just about everyone is carrying a camera or grabbing photos with their smart phones. It’s a day of fun packed inside one giant photo op.

This photo was taken on perfect April afternoon during the spring meet in 2014. It was shot in the paddock area as horses were warming up for the first race of the day. The paddock is one of my favorite places to shoot. It often leads to relaxed, picturesque images as opposed to the more urgent competition shots I get on the track. In the spring, the paddock is a vision of bright green grass under new green leaves, a welcome sight after a long, cold winter. In the fall, the paddock is a vision of bright green grass under changing autumn leaves.

The horse in this photo is Dynamic Royal, a 7-year-old who was warming up for the 28th start of his long racing career. He went on to finish second in the mile-and-a-sixteenth race that day. Dynamic Royal retired the following year after his 39th start. The Canadian-bred gelding ran mostly in secondary races at major tracks in his career, earning four wins and a little under $100,000.

Keeneland has hosted races since it opened in 1936. It’s one of the nation’s most “traditional” race tracks, retaining the same look and feel through the years while still adopting new technologies (even though it was the last race track in North America to broadcast race calls over a public-address system, adopting that practice in 1997). Keeneland was used for most of the racing scenes in the 2003 movie Seabiscuit because its appearance has changed little in decades.

Keeneland is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986.In 2009, Keeneland was ranked as the number one track in America by the Horseplayers Association of North America.