This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

The Derby and the two subsequent races that make up the U.S. Triple Crown are normally the year’s highlights for American enthusiasts, but this season will be even more packed with equestrian sports. The Paris Olympics this summer will feature international riders in dressage, show jumping, and the hybridized “eventing” discipline, and these competitions may generate more interest than usual because France is, as the Fédération Equestre Internationale puts it, “heaven for horse lovers.” Equestrian sports first made their Olympic debut in Paris more than 100 years ago.

Equestrian activities such as racing, show jumping, dressage, and eventing are the only elite sports that feature pairs of athletes that are fundamentally unknowable to each other. No one can doubt that the horses are trained specialists. But it’s difficult not to wonder if they have any idea what’s going on.

Deciphering the precise extent of any animal’s cognitive abilities is a tall order. The size and structure of other species’ brains can tell us plenty about how their bodies function, but not what degree of conscious thought or human-style intelligence they’re capable of. What we know about horse cognition in particular is limited, in part because “horses are big and expensive research animals,” says Sue McDonnell, an animal behaviorist and the founding head of the Equine Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Most of the questions researchers have asked about what it’s like to be a domestic horse are about how they understand humans, not how they understand their surroundings. Horses, for instance, have been found to recognize emotion on humans’ faces and recall them later on. Some recent work demonstrates that horses may be able to perceive basic goals of the humans working with them. They may even attach emotional memories to specific human voices. Cognition-wise, we know that horses possess enough intelligence for basic creative problem-solving and limited working memory. But attempts to understand their internal experiences have been mostly inconclusive, and the data that do exist come nowhere near confirming that horses are able to conceptualize competitive sports (let alone the state of Kentucky).

[Read: Horses can read human facial expressions]

The question of what horses are thinking and feeling during a race, if not a desire for bragging rights or a flowery cape, is hotly debated among the people who study, train, and compete with them. “I can only judge by their expression, but I can say for certain that for most of them, it’s terror,” McDonnell told me. The big, loud crowd; the tight space; and the close presence of unfamiliar animals they can smell but not see prime racehorses to react with adrenaline and fear when the starting bell sounds, she said. “You’d never see that speed in the wild horse unless they were threatened and stressed.” Their fear would be justified: Though the rate of fatal racehorse injury is at a near-15-year low, more than 300 died in 2023, and sport horses experience health issues such as gastric ulcers and pulmonary hemorrhage at rates of more than 70 percent.

It’s quite likely that the horses we race, jump, and otherwise prance about with feel stress while competing: Multiple studies from the past several years have shown as much by testing cortisol levels and other physiological indicators of tension. And though stress isn’t always harmful, evidence suggests that the training racehorses in particular go through can alter, and perhaps damage, their immune health. And we have no way of quantitatively measuring their level of psychological distress, because emotions like anxiety and fear don’t always manifest uniformly.

But horses have also learned to communicate how they’re doing in ways that don’t require laboratory analysis. Like us, they’re incredibly social animals, even with members of other species. (One growing trend in equestrian sports is to provide a lifelong travel companion for jet-setting horses in the form of a pony or goat, McDonnell said. “They’re just much more relaxed when they have their pony friend traveling with them.”) People who spend lots of time with horses can reasonably expect to be attuned to their emotional state. No assessment of a competition horse’s experience is complete without considering the horse-rider relationship, says Rachel Hogg, a psychology lecturer at Charles Sturt University, in Australia, whose Ph.D. work focused on that bond.

[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]

Many equestrian professionals do not believe that their animal colleagues are plagued by fear and anxiety. “Horses enjoy sports when it’s within their capabilities, when they’re treated with respect, and when training practices bring their personality and athleticism out,” says David O’Connor, the chief of sport for the United States Equestrian Federation, and a three-time Olympic medalist in eventing. But how we value a horse’s enjoyment depends on their level of intelligence. Horses might not be capable of realizing that some of their stablemates aren’t at the Olympics or careering around a racetrack. Would their happiness matter more to us if they were?

Part of the reason O’Connor is so adamant that some horses enjoy sports is that he’s seen what happens when they don’t. In the nearly 30 years he spent riding for the United States, O’Connor told me, he regularly saw horses opt out of participating. “Sometimes you’ll get a horse in the starting gate, you’ll start the race, and one of them will just be like, I’m not doing it,” he said. “Or they go out there and take two or three steps and they’re done.” Recognizing a horse’s agency isn’t just good for morale—it can save a rider from potential embarrassment.

Cultivating relationships with horses in which those signals are never missed is the foundation of O’Connor’s riding and teaching, he told me. But not everyone follows that ethos. Sometimes, genuine cruelty is involved: “There’s this tradition in the horse world that you have to dominate them,” McDonnell said. But more often, the barrier to a trusting relationship between horse and rider is logistical. Even at the highest levels of the sports, athletes can rarely afford their own horses, let alone the costs associated with getting them competition-ready.

The Olympic disciplines, in particular, are not conducive to deep relationships between horse and rider. They’re dominated by a “speed dating” system where business-driven owners seek to optimize matches for specific competitions, rather than lifetimes, Hogg said. “Catch riding,” where a horse-rider pair will interact just one or two times before competing together, is more common than ever, she added; athletes can train with nearly two dozen horses in a single day. (At the U.S. collegiate level, catch riding is sometimes mandated to eliminate advantages.) As a result, Hogg told me, some riders see investing in emotional relationships with individual horses as a luxury they literally can’t afford with prizes on the line.

[From the July 1925 issue: Inside the sordid world of horse racing]

And yet the horses at international sporting events, which cannot open bank accounts, are probably more likely to enjoy themselves when paired with an athlete they know well, Hogg said. Research has found that horses prefer and can even be calmed by the presence of familiar humans, and evidence suggests that as a horse and rider get more familiar with each other, their patterns of brain activity begin to sync up during rides. “If a horse is motivated to be involved” in equestrian sports, Hogg said, “it’s because of their social connection with us.”

Redesigning equestrian sports entirely around horses’ psychological welfare would be like redesigning the NFL to completely eliminate injuries: The product would be unrecognizable, and a lot of powerful people would stand to lose a lot of money. It’s also unlikely to be a top priority in a sport where horses are still regularly injured or killed. But maybe just once, instead of holding the Kentucky Derby, a crowd could gather to watch 20 horses simply hang out together at Churchill Downs on live television. They could even bet on which one becomes self-aware first.

Updated at 12:26 p.m. ET on May 5, 2024

One irony of the 2024 election is that, at a time when Americans profess exceptionally low faith in their government and institutions, their choices for president represent the most insider slate of candidates in at least a quarter century, and perhaps longer.

The Democratic nominee is Joe Biden, the sitting president, a former vice president, and a former U.S. senator of 36 years. The Republican nominee is Donald Trump, who is the most recent former president. The leading third-party candidate, the ostensible alternative, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is, well, exactly who his name suggests.

This produces another irony: Trump, despite being literally the former president, and Kennedy, despite being literally a Kennedy, have both worked to depict themselves as outsiders. During his current campaign, Trump has often insisted that he’s being persecuted by the criminal-justice system for standing up for the little guy. “Be totally unafraid to challenge entrenched interests and failed power structures,” Trump intoned in a February campaign video. “Relish the opportunity to be an outsider and embrace that label … It’s the outsiders who change the world.” Kennedy, too, has positioned himself as someone without any connection to existing power structures. “It’s not somebody who’s inside who’s going to solve the problem,” Kennedy said on NewsNation in March. “They’re the ones who gave us the problem. We need somebody who can think about it in a different way.” (“Accepted,” replied the host, Chris Cuomo, the son and brother of former New York governors.)

Biden has not tried to distance himself from the system in the same way. That’s partly an acknowledgment of the absurdity of doing so while president and partly an expression of Biden’s affinity for institutions, even as his presidency has quietly undermined many aspects of the existing system.

[Ronald Brownstein: Biden’s electoral college challenge]

For Trump to claim to be an outsider requires asking voters to forget about the four years he was president—which, to be fair, does seem to be a central aim of his campaign. Trump often criticizes Biden for issues that he himself either created or didn’t solve as president. Most prominently, Trump failed to complete his paramount campaign promise of building a wall that would secure the southern border. The major rise in violent crime over the past few years—which has now dropped sharply—began during his administration. He has again promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, having failed to do so as president.

Trump proposes different policies than Biden does, naturally, but that doesn’t make him an outsider—it makes him a typical presidential candidate. In office, his signature policy move was a tax cut that benefited wealthy Americans. This time around, his most drastically anti-system proposals involve politicizing the Department of Justice and overhauling the federal bureaucracy to eliminate the civil service. These are not populist reforms in any sense of the word, but instead changes that would encourage cronyism and political corruption.

Trump had a more persuasive claim to being an outsider in 2016, when he had never held or run for office, and had to overcome the opposition of most of the Republican Party leadership; by contrast, he controls the Republican National Committee today. But even eight years ago, the claim was questionable. Despite Trump’s umbrage at elites who he believes have long looked down on him, as my colleague McKay Coppins has reported, he is very much a product of an elite background. Trump is an alumnus of a private prep school and the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career with his family’s existing real-estate business, prospered by exploiting a tax code designed to aid people like him, and cannily used the bankruptcy system to get out of jams. During his 2016 campaign, he laid out how he had used political donations to obtain favors, such as giving to the Clinton Foundation and then getting Hillary Clinton to attend his wedding. The story demonstrated his place as a consummate inside operator.

[Russell Berman: The open plot to dismantle the federal government]

In short, Trump is railing against a system that created him and that he declined to change. Much the same is true of Kennedy, who would plainly not be a presidential candidate if he weren’t a member of the Kennedy family (notwithstanding the nearly uniform opposition to his candidacy among his relations). Kennedy invokes his father and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, frequently, and a super PAC supporting him even aired an ad during the Super Bowl that mimics one of JFK’s commercials. “This entire campaign is a pose, as is his outsider stance. He is a Kennedy. He is the fifth member of his family to run for president,” Rebecca Traister wrote in New York last year.

Kennedy’s claims to being against the system rest largely on his running as a third-party candidate, even though he became one only after he received practically no support as a Democratic candidate. His policy positions are less outsider than they are an incoherent mix of liberal and conservative: He backs a ban on abortion after 15 weeks and tight border enforcement, but he also wants single-payer health care and strong environmental regulation. Many are poorly fleshed out His most esoteric ideas—notably, his anti-vaccine obsession—are more expressive than wonkish, more anti-sense than anti-system. His largest campaign funder is the scion of the Mellons, a family even richer and more established than his own.

Weirdly, Biden has a claim to being both the most pro-system and anti-system candidate of the three. As recently as the 2020 campaign, the idea that he would seriously shake up the status quo would have seemed ridiculous. But in office, he has adopted a quietly revolutionary approach, attempting to overhaul the U.S. economy like no president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Last year, Biden became the first president to ever walk a picket line, marching alongside United Auto Workers strikers—the most visible but also perhaps least consequential in a string of moves to weaken employers. His Federal Trade Commission is the most anti-corporate in memory, banning noncompete clauses and seeking to block dozens of mergers. He has pushed an industrial policy in which the federal government puts its muscle and money behind key industries, a major shift from the neoliberal consensus of the past half century. He has canceled billions in student debt.

We likely won’t hear Biden touting himself as an outsider candidate, which produces a third irony of the 2024 presidential race: Notwithstanding his anti-system policies, Biden is running as the institutionalist candidate who will preserve American democracy, while Trump is working to destroy it—all in an effort to protect and serve the most entrenched interests around.

This article originally understated the number of years Joe Biden served as a senator.

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