Here in 2008, diversity remains a foreign concept in thoroughbred racing. The sport is still mainly a club for good ol’ (white) boys. You need a search warrant to find females or African-Americans in the important decision-making roles of industry organizations or race tracks.

Look at it like this: The campaign for President of the U.S. has more diversity than the upcoming Kentucky Derby, which has zero females or African-Americans occupying the key roles of owner, trainer, and jockey.

This state of affairs hurts the sport’s attempt to widen its audience. It’s human nature for people to have heroes who look like themselves. Where in thoroughbred racing can women and African-Americans find role models?

The sport seemed to make a breakthrough, at least in the gender department, when jockey Julie Krone held her own against the top males in the 1980s and ‘90s. But her success did not open the floodgates for female jockeys, just as Tiger Woods’ success in golf has not led to an influx of talented young African-American players.

The only way racing can claim it embraces diversity is by pointing to the huge number of Hispanic jockeys. The majority of the riders in Saturday’s Derby will have surnames like Saez, Prado, Gomez, Garcia, Velasquez, Flores, and Lezcano.

But this creates another problem for racing: The language barrier. Since horses can’t talk, it’s up to the jockeys to speak on their behalf. But many racing fans, and most of the racing media, are not fluent in Spanish. So there are misunderstandings. Nuances are lost in translation. Frustration abounds on both sides.

So, in an odd twist on the diversity issue, the sport now needs more top-notch white jockeys like Pat Day, Jerry Bailey, Chris McCarron, and Gary Stevens, who all retired in the last five years. They were gentlemen and ambassadors for their sport. They also were white and articulate. White fans related to them.

The suits who run racing don’t like to address issues involving diversity and inclusion. But don’t accuse them of intolerance. To the contrary, their tolerant attitude toward drugs and cheating has contributed mightily to the sport’s image problems. It’s no coincidence that racing has slipped off the radar screen of most America sports fans.

The sport’s human-interest stories are as fascinating as ever. The problem is, the suits who run the sports don’t know how to tell them. Even when a Smarty Jones or a Barbaro falls into their laps, they don’t know how to promote and market it. They have learned nothing from the lesson taught by the Seabiscuit book and movie – namely, the Americans love animals and moving stories about them.

Sadly, due to how the media has changed, it’s more difficult for newspapers to overcome the industry’s lack of vision.

As newspapers have been gobbled up by the big corporations that care only about the bottom line, editors in all areas have been forced to cut personnel and coverage. In the case of many sports editors, the horse-racing beat writer was the first to go.

Editors reason – not unreasonably – that racing has become far more of a gambling business than a sport. Heck, that’s what the people who run the game seem to think, so why shouldn’t newspaper editors? As a result, turf writers have gone the way of the do-do bird. Only the Courier-Journal, the Lexington Herald-Leader, and a handful of others still have fulltime turf writers.

As recently as the 1980s, the Derby was an annual must-stop on the itinerary of the nation’s most prominent newspaper columnists. Legendary writers such as Red Smith, Jim Murray, Blackie Sherrod, and Edwin Pope rarely missed the Derby because they loved the stories they could find on the backstretch. They understood that horse racing is a writer’s sport, more than any other.

But their spiritual ancestors never darken the doors of a racing pressbox, including the one at Churchill Downs. Today’s most influential sports columnists much prefer a routine NBA playoff game to the world’s most popular horse race. Even the sports columnists at Kentucky’s major dailies cover horse racing only when they can’t avoid it. On the whole, they’d much rather write about basketball recruiting.

Sports Illustrated used to run 50 to 60 horse-racing stories a year, and the Derby made the cover every year. It was automatic. But now horse-racing gets an SI cover maybe once a decade, if it’s lucky, and the world’s most popular sports magazine often gives short shrift to even the biggest races.

Chances are, horse racing never will regain the exalted position it occupied in the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. It will never be able to compete with the NFL, major-league baseball, or maybe even NASCAR. But it doesn’t have to go the way of professional boxing. It can get a bigger slice of the media pie and the public’s entertainment dollar.

One way is to get more women and African-Americans involved in the sport at all levels. Another is to tear down the language barriers. But perhaps the most important key of all is to get out the wonderful stories that racing produces more than any other sport.

Inherently, racing should have an edge over other sports. Kids grow up loving animals, and horses are the most beautiful animals of all. The trick is to turn animal lovers into racing lovers.

ESPN could be an enormous agent of change for racing. It’s the hip place for sports fans everywhere. If ESPN, through both its networks and its national magazine, started devoting more time to covering racing and telling the stories, the sport just might become cool again.

But the industry needs to help itself, too, by showing ESPN and other media outlets why it deserves more attention. It needs to do what Colonel Matt Winn did a century ago in promoting the Kentucky Derby – establish a rapport with the media that will pave the way for more coverage.

The media – and the public – care little about the business of racing. But they might be convinced to care a lot about the sport of racing. The sport’s leaders must start thinking that way. They must understand they are custodians of a sport that relies heavily on history and tradition. They must grasp that horse racing’s Bible is the Daily Racing Form, not the Wall Street Journal.

It would help a lot of the filly, Eight Belles, were to win this year’s Derby. That would be a good omen for Hillary Clinton supporters. It also would be a good story for the media. Mainly, it might shake up the good ol’ (white) boys club that still runs racing and impedes its progress.