The-Silent-Race-Campaign-for-Media-Coverage-of-Horse-Racing/157902570929473

The Kentucky Derby, one of North America's most important and biggest horse races, is arriving in a little more than 50 days, and millions will be attending, watching, and betting on this most exciting race.

 Uncle Mo, a favorite at this point of the KD prep trail could be our next Secretariat, Citation, or Affirmed, by winning the Triple Crown, and yet horse racing as a sport is fading slowly behind the horizon of a setting sun. While thousands watched those Triple Crown horses,  today's champion horses are lucky sometimes to get hundreds watching them. Stands at Hawthorne, Balmoral, even beautiful Arlington Racetrack are empty on most race days; this happens around the country as states like New Jersey and Maryland fight to keep their racetracks open. Harness racing is being threatened in Illinois.

 Newspaper editors tell those of us in this "save horse racing campaign" that horse racing doesn't deserve the little space they have left in newspapers. Instead, pages and pages are devoted to a non-professional basketball and football event, so much so that even the Breeder's Cup was preempted on ESPN by an overtime Northwestern football game. We hear more on the internet or in a newspaper about the poor moral choices made by so-called football, basketball, golf, and baseball heroes than we do about the heroes who gallop onto racetracks at 5:00 in the morning practicing for races. They do NOT make poor choices; they deserve some air time. Their back-stories are full of honor and passion--the right kind. Let's bring back the excitement, beauty, elegance of horse racing, NOW. Our brilliant athletes, both horse and jockey, sacrifice a lot on those beautifully manicured race tracks--the thoroughbred loves to run.

Zenyatta, the Queen of the racetrack, is gone to raise babies but not her legacy; she did SO much for our sport. Let us not disappoint her or forget her efforts to increase fan awareness. Zenyatta set an example of what can be accomplished through highlighting the beauty of horse racing to non-racing enthusiasts and casual fans. By the end of her career, she was being interviewed by members of the 60 minutes television show and filling the stands at Churchill on Breeder's Cup Day with one of its largest crowds. Not only her enormous talent but media coverage did that.

Let's save horse racing, increase the media coverage in honor of our Queen and all those who brought horse racing to the public's consciousness again. Please sign our petition to increase media coverage and get  people, new and old fans, back to the tracks NOW!!! OUR REGAL HORSES DESERVE IT!!!!