January 31, 2024: Quirky American Traditions: Ostrich Racing

[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]

On three ways to contextualize a very strange “sports” tradition.

1)      Exotic Animals: As the father to two sons who are quite obsessed with alpacas and make an annual pilgrimage to a wonderful alpaca farm (which is in fact going to be part of my wedding in a few months!), I’m certainly not here to critique the longstanding American and probably universal human tradition of falling in love with random exotic animals. But it is pretty darn random, as illustrated by the evolution of Chandler, Arizona—a small town that became home in the early 20^th century to a number of ostrich farms (for reasons that I can’t seem to suss out from any of the write-ups, so if anyone out there knows why or how this got started please add your thoughts in comments!) and that now more than a century later hosts an annual Ostrich Festival featuring not just racing (on which as an overall practice more in a moment) but it seems all things ostriches.

2)      A Silly Rivalry: There’s raising exotic animals and then there’s racing them, and when it comes to ostriches the development of the latter practice in particular seems to have been even more random still. In 1959, the editor of the Virginia City, Nevada Territorial Enterprise newspaper printed a fake story about camel racing in the community; the San Francisco Chronicle believed the story was real and reprinted it. The next year, to get back at the Nevada paper for having been duped, the Chronicle borrowed camels from the San Francisco Zoo and brought them to Virginia City for an actual race. This event has evolved into an annual tradition, one that features not only camels but also zebras, emus, and, natch, ostriches and that will run for the 64^th time this coming September. Virginia City isn’t America’s only site for annual ostrich races—Minnesota’s Canterbury Park features them at its annual EXTREME DAY, for example—but I’m willing to bet that the practice evolved just as randomly in each case, and yet has become an iconic tradition in each as well. America!

3)      Sports Betting: Unfortunately (to my mind, anyway) another longstanding American tradition, and one that is only becoming more ubiquitous in our current moment, is taking advantage of every possible opportunity to gamble. I didn’t know for a fact when I planned this post that folks out there bet on ostrich races, but I was willing to, well, bet that that was the case; and lo and behold, one of the first results when I Googled “ostrich racing” was this short video of a race from Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course in Grantville, PA. I have overall problems with gambling, in terms of what it too often means for the individuals and families (and communities) affected by it; but I have even more problems with gambling on animal racing, as it seems very likely to me that it can lead to the animals being mistreated or at least treated as a source of income rather than living creatures. So this is one quirky tradition I’d love to see end, or at least evolve.

Next quirky tradition tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?