One man’s quest to stop horse racing deaths.

Mary Bacon took a bullet while pilfering fruit as a child. Mary Bacon dropped out of school in the sixth grade and was pregnant by age 16. Mary Bacon had a romantic relationship with Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Mary Bacon was kidnapped by a stalker. That same stalker later tried to shoot her with a gun. Not all of those sentences are complete horseshit.

Glory, grief, and the race for the Triple Crown.

On bareback horse relay racing, a Native American tradition:

“It’s going to be America’s next extreme sport,” he predicts. “Compare it to Professional Bull Riders, PBR. Look how big that got—a million in prize money in every city they go to. That’s how Indian Relay is going to be in 10 years. I look for it to be at every track in the country by 2025.

Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.

The life and death of the racehorse Secretariat.

“The most decorated athlete in all of Kazakhstan is a five-year-old Mongolian horse named Lazer.”

Doping is a problem for equine sports, too.

Deep in debt, a man makes a large racetrack wager and recalls his history of gambling.

"I lean in to the betting window and tell her I want a grand on my horse. She looks shocked at first. She knows it’s a bet I shouldn’t be making, a bet I can’t afford, but she doesn’t know I’m running out of options. If I can’t come up with some serious cash soon, my number’s up. She types in some information but it seems to take her longer than usual."

After one of the most decisive wins in Kentucky Derby history, Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness, ending a promising career and beginning a herculean effort to save his life.

A profile of Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in American history.

How the heir to a horse racing empire became an informant on the Zetas cartel as they pushed their money laundering operations into the lucrative quarter horse trade.

An interview with Pavement’s Bob Nastanovich on his career afterlife as a “a clocker and chart-caller” and occasional breeder at an Iowa race horse track.

On the Mexican drug cartel accused of laundering money with race horses.

A writer’s trip home to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the racetrack inextricably linked with the histories of his family and his hometown.

Death on America’s racetracks:

At 2:11 p.m., as two ambulances waited with motors running, 10 horses burst from the starting gate at Ruidoso Downs Race Track 6,900 feet up in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains.

Nineteen seconds later, under a brilliant blue sky, a national champion jockey named Jacky Martin lay sprawled in the furrowed dirt just past the finish line, paralyzed, his neck broken in three places. On the ground next to him, his frightened horse, leg broken and chest heaving, was minutes away from being euthanized on the track. For finishing fourth on this early September day last year, Jacky Martin got about $60 and possibly a lifetime tethered to a respirator.