TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/974613
But sometimes you don't know what you're missing even when you can see everything. True, from the infield you really can't follow a race except on the big screens. But as the horses hurtle round the tightest circuit in Britain, they rotate a kaleidoscope of intoxicating colour: the blurred streaks of the jockeys' silks blending with the gorgeous throng of hats and frocks, the thunder of hooves amplifying the mortal hazards harnessed to the frivolous cause of a wager. Nowhere else in Britain do you get so intimate, so shocking a sense of the speed and chaos of race-riding. Horses explode between the shrieks of the crowd like corks from their champagne bottles. Yet if sport affords no more immediate sense of the here and now, then nor is it anywhere sustained by so umbilical a connection to the past; all the way, in fact, to Tudor times. For they have been racing here since 1539, when an alternative had to be provided to the traditional Shrove Tuesday entertainment—a violent precursor of football, in which the authorities had deemed too many heads were being broken. But it is not just the unbroken pageant of so many historic races that makes past and present so seamless on the 21st Century Roodee. Equally important, perhaps, is the way track and town are themselves entwined, not just culturally but also physically. Other than York, very few racecourses in Britain can be reached from a town centre in high heels. Racedays in Chester evoke the very earliest days of horseracing in Britain, when a few heats over a tract of common might enliven a town fair for the feast of a patron saint. Today, as for centuries past, citizens of every rank pour down the cobbled lanes of the old town to renew a cherished civic ritual. The net result is highly addictive. Chester, after all, is one of northern England's most charming tourist destinations, quite apart from the old curiosities of its racetrack. At the big May meeting, where all the most historic prizes are contested over three afternoons,