The lament of equine veterinarians and television producers is the same: Horses can’t talk. In an ideal world, equine veterinarians get around that limitation by relying on body language, physical examinations, and diagnostic testing. For television producers, there’s no such well of knowledge to create an intimate human-horse connection.
What, then, should the strategy be for producers attempting to document the world of Thoroughbred racing? For Netflix, which debuts a watchable, sometimes illuminating but largely surface-deep six-episode series called “Race for the Crown” on Tuesday, the solution is to rely on a tried-and-true formula used in its other successful sports docu-dramas – focus on the humans and ignore the rest.
The formula has produced some acclaim for Netflix’s “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” – to the consternation of gearheads who are more interested in race car dynamics than team dramatics – and for its “Full Swing,” which follows professional golfers through their often coddled and disconnected social and sporting lives. As a casual watcher of both series, I’m cognizant of the need to keep the audience hooked by playing up the drama. I’m also often frustrated that the avid fan seems to be the secondary audience.
Hard-core racing fans will probably experience the same frustrations with “Race to the Crown,” which spends its first three episodes on the run-up to the 2024 Triple Crown and then devotes the next three to each of the races in the series. The deliberate focus on trainers, owners, and jockeys, to the detriment of the horses that provide their livelihoods and, in some cases, fulfill their dreams, is by far the most glaring limitation of the series. Still, there are gems among the scree, and there’s no reason that a serious racing fan should avoid it.
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In fact, viewers with only a casual interest in racing will likely enjoy the peeks inside the lavish, ultra-competitive, and often small-minded worlds inhabited by the brash billionaires Mike Repole and John Stewart, especially when contrasted with the work-a-day routines of the trainers who appear in the series. Kenny McPeek and Danny Gargan, who each trained a winner in the 2024 Triple Crown, come off especially likeable in the series, but that may be because both are representative of that fading hero, the lifelong racetracker who gets a well-earned turn in the spotlight.
No criticism of the series or its subjects should ignore the gargantuan task facing the producers. Unlike professional auto racing and golf, with their limited rosters of high-profile participants, a great racehorse can emerge from hundreds of barns scattered across the country. Landing on the right story is a combination of luck and casting the net wide despite a limited budget. That Netflix’s cameras trailed McPeek throughout 2024’s Arkansas Derby Day – when the trainer won four races, including the Fantasy Stakes with budding superstar Thorpedo Anna, the eventual Horse of the Year – seems to be a product of sheer serendipity, especially when considering Mystik Dan wasn’t on the short list of Derby favorites at that time and needed his third-place finish to earn a spot in the race he would eventually win.
For jockeys, the producers early on decided to key their bets to Lanfranco Dettori, the Italian superstar who unretired late in 2023 after winning all there was to be won in Europe over his three-decade-plus career. When the documentary filming starts, Dettori has just recently relocated to Southern California in search of a new continent to conquer, including a desire to add a Triple Crown race to his trophy case.
Viewers get an intimate look at Dettori’s lifestyle, in which a glass of champagne appears to be the one guilty pleasure along with his low-calorie, leafy meals with his ever-present wife, Catherine. Dettori’s relationship with two young Italian riders in the Santa Anita jockey colony, Umberto Rispoli and Antonio Fresu, also produces several heart-warming moments, even for insiders of racing’s multi-generational ecosystem, where up-and-comers often end up competing with and eventually socializing with their heroes.
However, to establish Dettori’s connection with the upcoming Triple Crown, the producers have to rely on a time-shift in the first episode by airing a scene of a 2024 phone call between trainer Bob Baffert and Dettori that names him on Imagination, a colt who has no chance of running in the Derby due to Churchill Downs’s ban on Baffert but is being pointed to the Preakness. That thread eventually wears thin even as Dettori runs up some scintillating successes on the 2024 Santa Anita card alongside Rispoli and Fresu.
Perhaps aware of the weakening case for such a close look at Dettori, the series makes a smart pivot in its fifth episode to Katie Davis, the New York-based jockey who took off riding for 16 months surrounding the birth of a child in 2023. Though Davis has no mounts in the 2024 Triple Crown races but rides in some prominent undercard races, the meager connections to the main narrative can be excused given the deft handling of Davis’s story.
In one clip, Davis’s agent, Joe Migliore, tells Davis – perhaps for the first time, he says – that trainers told him that they didn’t want to ride Davis after she returned in 2023 because they didn’t want anything bad to happen to a new mother. Viewers watch Davis as she wheels a stroller past the parking-lot attendant who didn’t believe she was a jockey. In other clips, she quietly attends to her pre-race and post-race routines in small, empty locker rooms – in stark contrast to the bustling, camaraderie-filled jocks’ rooms for men on the same properties. On the whole, the viewer is made fully aware that the struggle is real, and that Davis is determined to overcome.
Any review of the series would be derelict not to mention Michael Iavarone, the subject of the first episode’s opening scene. Iavarone was part of a Wall Street-flavored partnership, IEAH Thoroughbreds, that scored big-time when Big Brown won the 2008 Derby and Preakness and was subsequently sold for an undisclosed price as a stallion, surely in the tens of millions.
A former New York junk-bond trader in soul and style who disappeared from racing a decade ago and then emerged from his cocoon in Miami with an expensive tan, a ludicrous wardrobe, and a coterie of short-skirted hangers-on, Iavarone gets included in the narrative despite his utter irrelevance to what’s happening on the dirt. But that’s showbiz, folks. Fortunately, the font runs dry 3 1/2 episodes in.
Still, Iavarone’s baffling inclusion does serve to underline the dilemma facing the producers, who surely went over their footage in the editing room and wished they could include a post-Derby comment from Mystik Dan about that frightening rush up the rail or from Dornoch about his attitude toward co-owner Jayson Werth.
When you can’t get your words from the horse’s mouth, you often have to settle for a horse’s ass.
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