Our crocodile tears for Varenne

Varenne has come to a halt in Eboli. “Il Capitano”, the last horse whose name the whole of Italy – not just horse racing enthusiasts – will remember, died of a heart attack at the age of 31 at a stud farm, and Italy realises it has the heart of a racehorse. The official Instagram page bids him farewell as he “flies towards his victories” and entrusts him to Enzo Giordano, the owner who died last year, as if it were a family funeral. The mayor of Copparo calls him “son of the wind”. ANSA reports that his was “a sudden death, just like his trotting races”: an insensitive metaphor when you consider that this time it was his heart that struck him down, not the final sprint. Newsrooms pull their obituaries out of the drawer: an animal receiving obituaries as if he were a head of state. This is how symbolic animals work in the age of social media. And after all, Varenne is the first horse to die in the Instagram era, with an audience built up post by post. But on closer inspection, the picture is a little less rosy.

Let’s start with the facts.

Varenne ran 73 races, winning 62 of them, raking in six million euros in prize money for his owners. The Italian trotting scene, by contrast, is characterised by horses squeezed dry like lemons from the moment they are foals, widespread doping (the latest case in Agnano, where eight people are on trial for animal cruelty and fraud: benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine, nandrolone and caffeine were found in the horses’ urine) and whips wielded with a light hand – in spirit, not in strength – against animals that cannot defend themselves. So much for the great collective outcry from animal rights activists.

Then came retirement, but Varenne did not rest. He became a ‘stud’. He is used for artificial insemination (so that his semen can be collected in test tubes), at an estimated cost of 15–18 thousand euros per dose in the early years. He has been the leading Italian stud horse without interruption since 2010. The horse’s frozen semen is shipped in refrigerated kits to Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the United States… He will have two thousand offspring, including five Italian Derby winners. In 2022, the estimated turnover – from the sale of his genetic material alone – will approach 20 million euros. A price list that still holds true today, for his obituary: the more he won, the more clicks his death generates.

Perhaps the grief is genuine. The fairy tale, however, is not.