We've been lied to

When watching horse races, you are not actually hearing horses race (via the Atlantic’s Alex Madrigal):

As the former BBC producer, Bill Whiston, related it on a 99% Invisible podcast, here’s the story:

When we do our horseracing, you’re not going to get somebody running around the course after the horses. There is no way. And occasionally you’ll come across very close up pictures of the horses of the far side, which is done off one of our roving cameras. But you have engine noise in that case, so therefore you wouldn’t want a microphone on that, because all you would hear is a car revving up and a cameraman cursing.

So, basically, the way you cover all of that sort of stuff is to run a tape which has the sound of horses hooves galloping, which is actually, if I remember correctly, a slowed down buffalo charge. That’s pretty much a standard thing, and I think it’s probably the same recording that they’ve used for years.

Click through and you can listen to (apparently) the sound of every recent horse race.

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