Is The Kentucky Derby As Decadent & Depraved As Hunter S. Thompson Found It In 1970?
In the spring of 2008, a year into my Internet career, I came up with the idea to weave the words of Hunter S. Thompson together with then-modern digital imagery to see if the Kentucky Derby was as decadent and depraved as the gonzo journalist found in 1970.
The post featured fist fights, women ripping off their shirts, drunks sprawled out across the Churchill Downs infield. Degenerates being degenerates. It was pure chaos unlike many on the Internet had ever seen. The resulting post became a huge hit and readers demanded it year after year.
Once I joined OutKick in June 2020 I stopped running the post. Maybe it had to do with the 2021 Churchill Downs rules stating fans had to wear COVID masks, which was one of the most absurd rules out of many absurd COVID rules.
Email: joe.kinsey@outkick.com
This week, for some reason, it popped back into my head: Does HST's work still hold up? Is the Derby still decadent and depraved? Does this American tradition dating back to 1875 still hold up 55 years after Thompson's story ran in the June 1970 edition of Scanlan's Monthly?
"This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling," Bill Cardoso, editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, reportedly wrote to Thompson after reading the story in Scanlan's. Thompson loved the description of his work. The rest is history.
Excerpts from Hunter S. Thompson's "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" as published in Scanlan's Monthly:
Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomitting on each other between races.
"The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.
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Fans slide through the mud in the infield prior to the 139th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on May 4, 2013 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by TJ Root/Getty Images)
Out to the track in a cab, avoid that terrible parking in people’s front yards, $25 each, toothless old men on the street with big signs: PARK HERE, flagging cars in the yard. 'That’s fine, boy, never mind the tulips.' Wild hair on his head, straight up like a clump of reeds.
Nelson Ricardo Martinez pours beer on Dan Malorni to reveal his Kentucky Derby 136 tattoo in the infield at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, Saturday, May 1, 2010. (Photo by Jason Sankovitch/Lexington Herald-Leader/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomitting in the urinals.
No booze sold out here, too dangerous…no bathrooms either. Muscle Beach…Woodstock…many cops with riot sticks, but no sign of a riot. Far across the track the clubhouse looks like a postcard from the Kentucky Derby.
Patrons dance in the infield before the 141st Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. Mandatory Credit: Jamie Rhodes-USA TODAY Sports
Steadman is now worried about fire. Somebody told him about the clubhouse catching on fire two years ago. Could it happen again? Horrible. Trapped in the press box. Holocaust. A hundred thousand people fighting to get out. Drunks screaming in the flames and the mud, crazed horses running wild.
Emerging from the tunnel was such a culture shock that it took us a while to adjust. "God almighty!" Steadman muttered. "This is a…Jesus!" He plunged ahead with his tiny camera, stepping over bodies, and I followed, trying to take notes.
A young man is covered in mud after sliding on the wet ground of the infield of the Kentucky Derby in 1984. / Getty Images
We hung around the press box long enough to watch a mass interview with the winning owner, a dapper little man named Lehmann who said he had just flown into Louisville that morning from Nepal, where he’d "bagged a record tiger." The sportswriters murmured their admiration and a waiter filled Lehmann’s glass with Chivas Regal. He had just won $127,000 with a horse that cost him $6,500 two years ago.
Does Decadent & Depraved hold up?
I'm left wondering if what Thompson would've encountered in 2025 would be any different than what he experienced in 1970. The angry drunks remain. People pissing on themselves waiting for a port-a-potty is a tradition that has been passed down generationally.
Is society more depraved than 1970?
You tell me.