Sport of Kings

This is Chloe. If you follow horse racing at all, you’ve probably heard of Chloellante of Samothrace. She had fifteen first-place wins in a single season, and naturally attracted a lot of media coverage.

The media enjoys painting us as demons, a “threat to the noble sport.” At the end of our first winning season, the authorities passed regulations and closed the loophole, to make sure Chloe would never race again.

We took advantage an omission in the rules. The rulebooks of thoroughbred racing never explicitly limited the field to members of the species Equus ferus caballus (domestic horses).

In theory, you could enter a thoroughbred horse race with a Plains zebra, or a European ass, or any of dozens of other branches of the family Equus. No one ever has because few of those sub-species are fully domesticated (and most aren’t terribly fast). You can’t blame the rule-writers for having a blind spot, who would want to enter a donkey in a horse race?

I’m sorry Chloe is so much faster than their finest horses. How could they predict a Pegasus would dominate their sport?

Next year, I’m going to try Cerberus in a greyhound race.