How hard can camel racing be, anyway?
Right out of the gate, our reporter thinks she’s in over her head — but a surprise awaits
Buried somewhere in the dirt racetrack at Sam Houston Race Park is a microphone and its receiver that carry 10 seconds of me losing my marbles. I’m not sure that I ever want it found.
But I am curious: What exactly did I sound like on Friday night as I raced a camel on such a dizzying and slam-bouncy ride that the following morning I woke up with two purple-blue knees and an inability bend over? The race lasted only 10 seconds, but it felt like I lived an entire lifetime between the moment my camel bolted out of the gate and the time we crossed the finish line in a tie for first place.
And let me tell you something else: Camels are a lot faster than you’d think.
Camel and ostrich races pitting members of the media against one another are an
annual fan favorite at the racetrack between the Live Thoroughbred Races.
The act of strapping a reporter to the back of a camel’s hump and shooting them down the straightaway at the track in northwest Houston is an annual tradition. I was joined by Maria Salazar from Fox 26, Alex Middleton from the Rod Ryan radio show and another rider named Shelly Guerra in a four-way race shortly after 9:30 p.m. Friday. Salazar and Middleton were well prepared, having both watched several online videos of their co-workers and others racing aboard the camels in years past. Me? I had no idea what was going to happen. I sort of assumed it would be leisurely.
But oh, boy, was I wrong. The technique for riding a camel was explained very simply. There’s a box made of rails set up around the camel’s hump. We sit behind the hump and in front of the back rail. While we’re in the gates, we keep our arms in and our feet up. But once we’re out of the gates, we’re supposed to lean over the hump, grabbing onto the front rail with our hands, and let our legs go out straight — almost like we’re standing in stirrups. But, you know, without stirrups.
It’ll be easy, our camel whisperer, Joe, told us in a 5-minute how-to session before the race. “Just don’t be tense. Stay loose.”
I tried to pretend like I’m the kind of person who doesn’t get tense. But I asked so many follow-up questions that I seriously doubt I fooled anyone. Still, I hopped on my camel with relatively few fears, a real feat.
I was supposed to be riding Camel No. 1, which I’d named Camel Cabello at the suggestion of my boyfriend. But at the last minute, they swapped me and Guerra, so I was on Camel No. 2. Someone helped me kick a leg over the camel’s back, and I settled in, marveling at how fluffy the camel’s fur felt under my hands.
“This’ll be like riding a pillow,” I remember thinking.
Then came the rude awakening. The gate kicked open, and my camel took off like someone had lit a fuse under it. Immediately, I crouched forward to grab the bars in front of me, my chest leaning against the hump, which pounded into my sternum with the power of a million hammers on each of what felt like a million strides.
I held tighter. But at some point, I must have begun pressing harder with my right hand than my left because the entire cage began leaning off the side of the camel. I felt myself sliding off its side at a pace that felt like it could break a speed limit. Each step sent me a little farther to the right, all while my glasses slid a little farther down my nose.
I took my left hand off the rail to slam my glasses back onto my face — so hard that the next day I had a small bruise on the bridge of my nose. But that only pushed me farther to the right.
That’s when things got super slow. Like, “I’m going to fall off this camel and possibly break all my bones” slow. I grabbed onto the right rail with my right hand and pulled it back to center with all of my might, crushing my chest against the camel’s hump.
I wish I could remember if I said anything to myself at this moment. Maybe a “you can do it” or an “oh, God.” But this must have been when the microphone clipped to the collar of my shirt got tugged off, leaving a long scratch down my chest and stomach that still hurts to touch.
I was so focused on getting the bar back into place that I stopped looking ahead of me, and I was sure that I’d slowed my camel down so completely that I must be dead last.
It wasn’t until all the camels had made it past the finish line, and we were led to the winner’s circle, that I saw the photo finish on the jumbotron: me, in my dark-brown jacket, up top on the very center of my camel, crossing the finish line in a tie for first.