One frigid afternoon not long ago, I stood overlooking the paddock at the Aqueduct racetrack, doing my best to evaluate the entries in the upcoming contest; it was an event for younger horses who had never won a race, or maidens. A couple of them were going out for the first time, but all of their records were scant. When that’s the case, a handicapper will ordinarily turn to pedigree: the horse’s father (sire), mother (dam), and the dam’s sire. Some will go back a second generation or a third. That’s a standard angle, and while I can’t ignore it, and I don’t, I’ll look first at the trainer of the horse, and what his record might be in this kind of race.

The Daily Racing Form didn’t have much to say on the matter, so I turned to the horseplayer next to me. He was going to bet on the favorite, and he had his reasons, one of which was a 10 percent ownership stake in the animal in question.

I don’t remember who trained the horse I was leaning toward, but I brought up that conditioner’s name, and said I admired his work.

“Let me tell you something, young man.”

I am not a young man.

“If you had the money behind you that that trainer does, you’d be successful, too. Because that’s what it takes to win in this game, son. Money.”

May 8, 2025

White smoke chuffed from a chimney above St Peter’s Square in Rome, signifying Chicago native Robert Prevost—the first American!—had been elected pope. He settled on the papal name Leo XIV, no mere coincidence, Vatican watchers did agree, but a deliberate look back to the most recent Leo, the XIII. Thus was the last pope of the nineteenth century—he died in 1903—thrust into the headlines.

The man who would be Leo, Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci was the former bishop of Perugia, hardly a celebrated sinecure, since 1846, but when he was elected after a mere three ballots in 1878, in the opinion of papal historian Eamon Duffy, “It was as if [he] had been waiting to be pope. Between 1874 and 1877 he had published a series of pastoral letters which spoke positively about the advance of science and society in the nineteenth century, and which argued for reconciliation between the Church and the positive aspects of modern culture.”

Leo’s pontificate overlapped precisely with the Gilded Age. Vast fortunes, especially in the United States, were accumulated in industry and finance; the names from that era, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and a man whose name is affixed to one of the world’s most powerful banking concerns, Morgan, still resonate to this day. The Monopoly Man of the board game, mustache fluffed, top hat flying high, ironically first appeared in the midst of the Great Depression, 1935, and remains an emblematic caricature of those receded halcyon years.

But while skilled labor, bolstered by trade unions in America, saw an increase in wages, across the Atlantic, a retrenching middle class (a phrase that sounds spookily contemporary) enjoyed no such advances. The urban (and rural) poor suffered—the poor always suffer—at the hands of a voracious capitalism. The working and lower classes appeared to be sinking deeper.

Leo found this widening disparity impossible to ignore, and in 1891 he published the work for which he is best known, Rerum Novarum, now noted widely, and in these pages, too, as the foundational document of Catholic teaching on social justice. (see Stephen P. White in the Fall 2025 issue of Human Life Review Vol.LI No.4). Rerum Novarum “of new things,” has come to be known in English by its main topic, Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, and that is what the encyclical concerns itself with. Mostly.

The document opens with sorrowful commentary on the “misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the working class,” while having previously warned of “crafty agitators”—read Socialists—seeking to capitalize, no pun intended, on the envy of the rich by the non-rich, a persistent sin, and the contempt of each class for the other.

Reminding his readers that reason separates man from beast, the pontiff explains in Rerum Novarum that by the benefit of this unique gift is humanity able to plan for the future, to create usefulness for succeeding generations, by, for example, and in another slap at the collectivists, the purchase of land, and the right to private property, which is earned money in another form.

Leo XIII lashes out against “rapacious usury” (decades before we were paying 30 percent interest on our credit card purchases), another long-standing evil, one that has always been with us, he notes, and an evil that the church has forever decried. That’s an enduring similarity between Leo XIII’s era and the current pontificate of Leo XIV—one of many points that makes this encyclical seem so fresh and so relevant, so prescient today.

At the Track: Labor, Capital, and the Cost of Entry

Dating back pretty much to the dawn of recorded history, horse racing will always be with us in some form. But the contemporary industry’s problems—painfully familiar to the railbirds who populate venues like the soon-to-be-a-memory Aqueduct Racetrack—are too numerous to articulate here. Here’s a couple.

Given its forever epithet Sport of Kings, racing is derided by the uninitiated as a rich man’s game. That cliché is somewhat misleading when accounting for the network of unglamorous souls whose labor provides owners and trainer (aka “the connections”) their structure of support, blearily at work before dawn, feeding, watering and grooming the animals who need to be exercised whether they’re in training or not. A general estimate suggests it takes eight humans to prepare one horse for a race. These “back siders” are a far cry from royalty. But considering the wealth it takes to compete at the higher levels of the sport, with the lower levels depopulating daily, and smaller tracks shuttering one by one, the 10% owner we met at the top of this piece makes a well-taken point.

The declining foal crop is troubling. According to the Jockey Club, an industry organization that registers thoroughbreds, in 2001 about 35,000 foals were born in the United States. By last year, that number had shrunk to slightly more than 16,000. These are estimates, but with such a steep drop in supply, demand has intensified, and purchase prices are eye-popping. As reported by auction house Fasig-Tipton, its two-day sale last August in Saratoga Springs grossed over $100 million, and a one yearling sold for $4 million, the auction’s most expensive transaction in twenty-five years. With prices like these, the merely affluent are being boxed out of the action, too.

Given these blow-away numbers, it’s no wonder ownership concerns can’t get their champions off the racetrack and into the breeding shed fast enough. Take the case of Flightline, the 2022 Horse of the Year. He didn’t just win races, he destroyed fields stacked with the best competition they could throw at him. An amazing racehorse, he retired to stud undefeated, but there’s a caveat: Flightline only ran six races.

Cast your mind back to a name from racing’s Golden Age, the 1970s: Spectacular Bid. The Bid made 30 starts and won 26 of them, finishing second, or placing, twice, and showing, or finishing third one time. That’s 29 out of 30 starts in the money, and in his last race, the 1980 Woodward Stakes at Belmont Park, with nobody brave enough or foolish enough to challenge him, he galloped around the Belmont oval unaccompanied even by his own shadow (the afternoon was cloudy), a winner by walkover.

In his day, Spectacular Bid was practically a household name. Almost no casual fan—are there any casual fans left?—could even tell you who Flightline is (the 2022 Horse of the Year) and it’s hardly their fault. By the time anybody with a glancing knowledge of the game had become aware of him, he was finished with racing and dutifully covering mares.

A Mirror of the Modern Economy

The thoroughbred racing industry—not the sport, and not the game, which concerns itself with handicapping and betting, but the industry—is a microcosm of prevailing economic realities. In the United States and elsewhere, current opinion suggests that a greater—and growing—percentage of wealth is concentrating into a fewer—and shrinking—number of hands. Employing the Gini Coefficient, a metric used to identify inequality in both income and wealth, 0 represents perfect equality and 100 stands for total lopsidedness. Norway clocks in with a Gini number of 17.6, according to Oxfam, an independent confederation of Non-Governmental Agencies (NGOs). Zambia appears to be the most egregious offender with a Gini of 70, and the US, 46.8. Over the last 45 years, that American number has jumped about 8 points.

Gini Coefficient notwithstanding, reams of other publicly available statistics will bolster this argument: everything that concerns itself with making money—which is, let’s face it, a worthwhile pursuit—has arrived at a moment where the endeavor in question is either gigantic, or it is nothing. That which is not enormous will be crushed. Ask the pharmacist who was running a family-owned drugstore that was devoured by CVS, a main street grocer who was steamrolled by Walmart, a guy who was trying to make it by running a neighborhood restaurant. I could go on, but this is depressing. Racing has devolved along almost exactly the same lines.

Witness the rise of the so-called Super Trainer and his Super Barn, defined by industry publication Bloodhorse, as a stable that races 400 horses in a given year. Trainer Todd Pletcher sent out 729 runners in 2025, winning 142 times, a fat 19 percent win rate. A handful of others dominate the sport, but there’s no point confusing the issue with a bunch of names unfamiliar to a general readership, although a certain silver-wigged, blue-bespectacled Californian does come to mind. By contrast, a talented, hard-working conditioner based in Lexington, Kentucky, a cowboy of a guy I talk to sometimes, sent out 83 starters. His horses didn’t win much. He just doesn’t have the stock, at least not yet.

Dignity Beyond the Purse

Despite the high ideals at Oxfam, inequality is the stubborn history of the world, and it isn’t going away any time soon. This reality did not elude Leo XIII. But he takes care to note that all humans possess equal dignity and are deserving of equal justice, that that dignity is immutable, whether we’re mucking stalls or making million-dollar bids on yearlings at auction, because it is imbued, not by what we have or what we do, but by God alone.

I like to hope that there’s enough to go around for all of us, owners, horsemen, horseplayers, turf writers, all of us, and we all have a part to play in this fascinating, frustrating, mystical game. And had old Leo XIII been a leathery handicapper and not the 253rd inheritor of the Chair of St Peter, I like to hope that he’d agree with me. I’ll let him have the last word.

“Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others. ‘He that hath a talent,’ said St Gregory the Great, ‘let him see that he hide it not; he that hath abundance, let him quicken himself to mercy and generosity; he that hath art and skill, let him do his best to share the use and the utility hereof with his neighbor.’”