Do Americans really give a shit about horse-racing?

A couple of years ago, this movie Seabiscuit came out, and it was about a famous race horse that won 3 races in a row back during the Great Depression era. Apparently, it was a big national story at the time, or so the makers of this movie would have us believe. In the weeks and months leading up to this movie's release, there was a steady stream of Seabiscuit-related media on the television, and it's hard to believe that this was a coincidence. Clearly, whoever made Seabiscuit was in cahoots with some other big media types, and plans were made to hype up horse-racing so that everybody would go see this movie.

Soon thereafter, we were presented with the story of Barbaro, the fantastic American hero of a horse who would, like Seabiscuit, remind Americans of our grand struggle and our triumph over adversity by winning three races in a row. I never saw Seabiscuit, but I got the impression that it presented the horse as some metaphor for Americans' struggle with and eventual triumph over the Depression and the Nazis. I think the Barbaro story was implicitly sold as some extension of the 9/11 narrative--you know, how we Americans would triumph over the forces of Islamo-fascism just like Barbaro would run faster than those other horses. Then Barbaro died and, I shit you not, this made front page news in every major newspaper, and the anchors of the various news shows hung their heads and fought back tears as they described the national tragedy of the dead race horse for weeks, and I thought to myself, "really?"

Since when was horse racing actually such an important thing that so many Americans cared so much about. In my mind, the sport's importance has historically been confined to the Kentucky area, and was viewed outside of the region as sort of a colloquial phenomenon. Like wind-surfing or competitive bowling or something. Not something that grasps the national attention in the way that truly national sports like baseball, football, or basketball do. I mean, how many Americans actually watch horse racing regularly or would even have any idea who won the latest horse race if left to their own devices and weren't force-fed this information by major news outlets? I'm guessing not many. Yet, again we have the tale of Big Brown the almost-champion horse posted all over the media, with column after column of press devoted to analysis of why this great horse was unable to win the most recent race, what with the fact that he had won two races before that.

It remains a mystery to me how this sport gets hoisted onto the front pages, with these horses treated like national heroes. Is there some conspiracy between horse-racing promoters and media moguls to promote the sport via the news media? Are journalists and other media types, for whatever reason, more keen to horse racing than other classes of Americans, such that they are naturally drawn to such coverage? Or is this just a self-perpetuating myth, in which the journos at some point were led to believe that horse racing is nationally important, such that they jump all over horse racing stories whenever they arise? Or am I totally off-base here, and Americans on the whole really do love horse racing?