A Hot Tip

The power of horse racing never ceases to amaze me. I have just finished reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the remarkable memoir by Jean-Dominque Bauby, the editor-in-chief of French Elle, who suffered a massive stroke that resulted in "locked-in" syndrome. After his stroke, Bauby was only able to turn his head and blink his left eye. It is a remarkable piece of writing, made even more remarkable by the fact that he dictated the entire book, letter by letter, blinking his left eye to represent letters of the alphabet.

Each chapter is a tour-de-force of language and memory as Bauby documents the "diving bell" existence of being imprisoned in his body and the "butterfly" memories that permit him to escape. One of those memories involves a day he spent at the race track in Vincennes, France. Bauby and his good friend, Vincent, spent a day at the track as guests of the track correspondent who treated them to a delicious lunch and a great tip on a horse named Mithra-Grandchamp.

Alas, the two, who had promised to bet on the sure winner for the rest of their colleagues in the newsroom where they were working at the time, lingered too long over lunch and were shut out at the betting counter. Apparently, as Bauby writes, "Rumor had turned [Mithra-Grandchamp] into a mythic beast, and everyone was determined to bet on him. All we could do was watch the race and hope..."

Naturally, Mithra-Grandchamp crossed the finish line forty yards ahead of his nearest competitor leaving Vincent to mutter, "Idiots! We're complete idiots! When we get back to the office, we'll be history!"

Bauby uses Mithra-Grandchamp as a metaphor for lost opportunities and a subtle exhortation to take advantage of "the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away." But I find it remarkable that of all the memories he chose to preserve, blink by blink, he recalled a horse race in which he could even remember the horse's name and his margin of victory. I find it fascinating that horse racing creates such an indelible imprint on its spectators.

To be sure, the point of the chapter is not the horse or the race but a pining for those days of "near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winners" told without self-pity, only genuine remorse.

By the way, Bauby and Vincent managed to pay back all the colleagues whose bets they failed to place.