Grand, annual, and elegantly equine

July 18, 2010|John Powers, Globe Staff

SARATOGA SPRINGS — As a rule I don’t turn up at the racetrack in a seersucker jacket and tie, but I do here. One never knows when the Whitneys might proffer an invitation to their private box so it’s wise to be appropriately turned out, just as it was in the 19th century when this spa town was the playground for polite society. Horse racing may be disappearing from the American landscape, yet Saratoga’s gracious and leisurely allure endures in a time warp of the most pleasant sort.

“From New York City you drive north for about 175 miles, turn left on Union Avenue and go back 100 years,’’ sports columnist Red Smith wrote decades ago, and that hasn’t changed. The Victorian-era “cottages’’ still line the streets and Broadway still bustles as it did in the 1870s when the United States and Grand Union hotels welcomed thousands of wealthy visitors in search of diversion.

People come here for the waters. They come for Skidmore College, for the Tanglewood-style concerts and dance at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, for the museums. But in August they come for the ponies at what long ago was labeled “the dowager queen of the American turf,’’ the oldest sporting venue in the country.

Saratoga, which opened a month after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, begins its 142d racing meet Friday and runs until Sept. 6, the track’s longest stretch since 1882. As always “The Spa’’ will attract the top horses and trainers for its big stakes races: the Whitney, the Alabama, the Woodward, and the million-dollar Travers, the country’s oldest major thoroughbred race, first held in 1864.

This year the Travers, on Aug. 28, is expected to attract all of the Triple Crown race winners: Super Saver (Kentucky Derby), Lookin At Lucky (Preakness), and Drosselmeyer (Belmont). Last summer the Woodward was the highlight race because it featured filly Rachel Alexandra taking on — and beating — the older boys in a historic chase that went to the wire.

Yet most of Saratoga’s habitués come for the track’s throwback charm. It’s a lawn party, with gentlemen and ladies strolling the grounds in their summer finery. But it’s also a country fair, with families bringing umbrellas and coolers for picnics on the backyard lawns beneath the elm trees. Everything about the place is romantically retro — the old wooden grandstand, the lake in the middle of the track, the striped awnings, the greeters in straw hats and red vests, the carousel, the gazebo, the Big Red Spring spouting mineral water, the hand-rung bell sounding 17 minutes before post time.