The fluttering of silks and the sips of mint juleps are part of horse racing’s mythology, but if you dig beneath those layers, you’ll find a world of broken legs and gruesome breakdowns, drugs and pain. The animals used to race are not born to run, and they don’t love to compete. They are drugged, whipped, and thrust into training and racing too soon, and they spend most of their work lives in solitary confinement. And while improved medical care has made the sport safer for some horses, many still break down under the strain of the pounding of hard tracks and high speeds.

Horses are prey animals, and they instinctively prefer the safety of the middle of the pack. But being in the middle of this particular pack would have been miserable–dirt getting kicked in your face, nothing to see but horse butts. That day the leader was War of Will, a big chestnut colt who moved with hypnotic smoothness on the clubhouse turn, pulling away from Mongolian Groom and McKinzie.

From the shadowed grandstand, you could feel the tension in the air. Everyone had their money on a horse, and it was going to be close.

In the earliest races, only two or three horses were entered, and bets were placed directly between owners. When an owner withdrew, he or she forfeited half of the purse. Disinterested third parties recorded these agreements and became known as keepers of the match books. One of them at Newmarket in England, John Cheny, published An Historical List of All the Matches Run (1729), which became the model for modern racing form books.

By the 1850s, heat racing was commonplace, and horses were being bred to carry more weight in shorter distances. By the early 1860s, six-year-olds were carrying up to 168 pounds in four-mile races. The original King’s Plates were standardized races for six-year-olds, but races for older horses continued until the end of the Civil War.

The modern breeders of racehorses are obsessed with speed and power, but they’re also breeding them for massive torsos and spindly legs that don’t fully mature until age 6. The typical thoroughbred is rushed into intensive training at 18 months, and starts racing at 2 — the rough equivalent of a first-grader.

When journalists cover elections by focusing primarily on who’s ahead and behind – what’s known as horse race coverage – voters, candidates and the news industry suffer, a growing body of research shows. This updated collection of research aims to change that.