The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

by Hunter S. Thompson

This was a seminal sports article by Hunter S. Thompson on the 1970 Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, first appearing in an issue of Scanlan's Monthly in June of that year. Though not known at the time, the article marked the first appearance of gonzo journalism, the style that Thompson came to epitomize through the 1970s.

The article's focus is less on the actual race itself—indeed, Thompson and Steadman could not actually see the race from their standpoint—and more on the celebration and depravity that surrounds the event, as well as other events in Louisville (Thompson's home town) in the surrounding days.

Genres: Nonfiction, Journalism, Short Stories, Classics, Humor, Sports, Audiobook

21 pages, ebook

First published June 1, 1970

About the author

Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937-2005) was an American journalist and author, famous for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics and other mind-altering substances (and to a lesser extent, alcohol and firearms), his libertarian views, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority. He committed suicide in 2005.

Reviews

[Arthur Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fifty years on, this remains one of the finest pieces of American journalism ever written. Read for yourself here.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long before there existed a merchant association's campaign to "Keep Louisville Weird," Hunter S. Thompson was the living embodiment of the concept -- a local boy and the alien spawn of its weirdness, a favorite son that his civic parents embraced with the furtive hugs reserved for Black Sheep. Heroes' welcomes have been reserved for the 'Ville's more "respectable" alumni. Jennifer Lawrence, Diane Sawyer, Colonel Sanders, Muhammad Ali; these and others are enshrined in monumental images on the sides of the city's buildings, on mega-billboards deemed "Hometown Heroes." So far, there is only one literary notable so enshrined: Sue Grafton. Sue Grafton. Sue .... Grafton.

Hometown heroes are not allowed to take drugs and commit suicide, you see? Bad for the youth.

Mr. Thompson could not go home again, but he knew his way around the block. In this 1970 consideration of his hometown's most famous event, he largely bypasses the event to get at the heart of its darkness.

Thompson was not only the city's most notable writer, but also its most biting humorist, and here he is in full-throttle glory.

As I haven't read this recently enough to have fresh impressions for a cogent, intelligent review; I'm simply giving this a general recommendation. It's not really a book, but a now-famous article from Scanlan's Monthly in 1970 and a high-point in Hunter Thompson's creation of gonzo journalism, as well as the beginning of his fruitful partnering with the stylistically whacked illustrator, Ralph Steadman.

It is, in fact, one of the funniest stories ever written. A story about an event that is not about the event very much but about the observer's reactions to the world of 1970 that revolved around it, and his own drug-addled alienation from it. The opening graphs are every bit as good as those from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Read it here: http://brianb.freeshell.org/a/kddd.pdf

As for Thompson and his Louisville legacy, he understood the game. It's OK to be weird, but not too weird. If his face was painted on the side of a building, and if he was still with us, he'd probably just sling out a couple of his .44 magnums and use his monolithic visage for target practice.

(KevinR@Ky, substantially amended in 2016)

[Maricruz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Según cuenta la historia, el primer ejemplo de periodismo gonzo. O, más bien, el primer artículo de Hunter S. Thompson que hizo a un editor soltar la palabreja aquella, «gonzo», dejando que luego innumerables personas intentaran explicar a qué carajo se refería. Pero Thompson, que era más espabilado, de inmediato se apropió del término: «Sí, claro, eso es lo mío. Gonzo».

Desde luego el artículo es tan excesivo, grotesco y lisérgico que acabas hasta un poco con resaca. Y la asociación entre Hunter S. Thompson y Ralph Steadman debe de ser una de las más afortunadas desde que alguien decidió acompañar los huevos fritos con patatas.

[India · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read anything by Hunter S. Thompson and this was as great a place to start as any. What a madman! I loved this piece and look forward to more.

[Dianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

People used to read interesting, informative sometimes funny magazine articles. This is one of those articles written by a famous witty writer. What I found out about this famous horse race besides the well known fact that there are many addicted gamblers ready to spend their last ten bucks on the dream of winning back some small amount of the fortune they have lost on the horses is how inebriated many of these well dressed people become at the track.

[Jerrica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure why this is listed as 222 pages on Goodreads when it would probably come out to 25-30.

In typical Thompson style, laugh-out-loud hilarious with sharp social commentary, especially funny when I remember "Derby Day" in college, an event to which I was not invited because apparently I can't handle my liquor and hard drugs like these people.

Link to full article for those who want to pass a little time laughing: https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/hun...

[Alex Gruenenfelder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't even know how to describe this piece. It's funny, strange, and largely absent of much to be pulled about the Kentucky Derby. If you like Hunter S. Thompson, as I do, you'll appreciate its wit and strange composition. You also may, if you really try hard, learn something about what it's like to be at the Kentucky Derby.

[Mercedé Khodadadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

یک گزارش کوتاه و واقعی از مسابقات اسب‌سواری در کنتاکی در سال‌های ۱۹۵۰. نویسنده مبدع سبک روزنامه‌نگاری به سبک روایت شخصی و غیربی‌طرفانه است. به این سبک گانزو می‌گویند.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommend the audio version of this long form article, with Thompson doing most of the narration.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Next year, when spring is in glorious bloom and mid-May comes around on Derby weekend, do yourself the favor of downloading or otherwise locating the audiobook version of this "Rolling Stone" magazine piece which catapulted Thompson into Gonzo Journalism fame. Narrated by actor Tim Robbins, with lush, jazzy musical accompaniment by the legendary Bill Frisell, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" captures Thompson in his most hilarious and paranoid vision of a Vietnam-era Lexington afternoon, doomed to be sabotaged by Black Panthers, white supremacists, and the whisky gentry, with an unsuspecting Ralph Steadman, arriving from England to document the whole affair with this wine-stained illustrations.

[Dylan Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We didn’t give a hoot in hell what was happening on the track. We had come there to watch the real beasts perform.”

Hunter S. Thompson is the man. He’s like if David Foster Wallace was cool, and also sort of unhinged. In fact, behind DFW and John Jeremiah Sullivan (more on him coming soon), Hunter S. Thompson has got to be my favorite essayist (?) to read. I loved two of his essays I read a while back - one on hippy culture and another on Nixon’s death - and had sort of been saving this one, as in my understanding it’s sort of the one that shot Thompson into the spotlight as the sensation he’d become. This is also the story that (famously) invented gonzo journalism, and it’s interesting to read the INVENTION of a new genre. But I’m trying to decide if I’m confused by how much of a sensation this was. It’s great, because everything he writes seems to be great, but did it BLOW my MIND? I’m not sure. But now we’re back in that conversation of: how can I appreciate the novelty, the cutting-edge/revolutionary aspect of something that was written FIFTY years ago? I’m dinging this because it’s not as good as Foster Wallace or Jeremiah Sullivan at their best, but without this, we wouldn’t HAVE those other guys.

This wicked hilarious piece is about the weekend where Hunter S. Thompson was sent to the Kentucky Derby on assignment for a dinky magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly. I’d vaguely known this, but the Kentucky Derby is apparently a madhouse, and Thompson becomes something of an informal tour guide to the British cartoonist Scanlan’s has paired him with. This is just the story of their weekend. It ends up being more depraved than decadent, and it’s compulsively readable.

Thoughts:

Elephant in the room, and something I’d not really realized until this one: Hunter S. Thompson is a menace to society. Between strongly implying he writes for Playboy (he does not), macing his waiter for no discernible reason, sneaking into senators’ press boxes, and other bad behaviors he won’t recount, it sounds like he was not his best self over the course of this weekend. It’s pretty hilarious.
(“I took the expressway out to the track, driving very fast and jumping the monster car back and forth between lanes, driving with a beer in one hand and my mind so muddled that I almost crushed a Volkswagen full of nuns when I swerved to catch the right exit.”)
(“On our way back to the motel after Friday’s races I warned Steadman about some of the other problems we’d have to cope with. Neither of us had brought any strange illegal drugs, so we would have to get by on booze.”)

Despite the conflicted thoughts up top, this made me want to go to the Kentucky Derby, and it made me want to read more Hunter S. Thompson. I’ll be on to the Great Shark Hunt before long. Hope he didn’t drink so much for that one.

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fact that this story has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the horse racing is, frankly, one of the best things about it. Hunter S. Thompson was always at his best when discerning the habits and defects of the human animal, and while I'm sure he would have found some way to make the excruciatingly tedious exercise that is your typical horse race exciting, it's probably for the best that he wasn't paying attention. He had come to "watch the real beasts perform," he later said, recalling his homecoming to a sweltering, thronging Louisville in the spring of 1970.

What follows freely blends journalism with creative writing, casting the author himself as a character within events and caring not where he crosses the line between fact and fiction. Both blend together freely into a portrait made of emotion and sensation, more than strictly factual sports journalism. The portrait is a grotesque one, much like the portraits described in the text, but no less revealing for it.

Accompanied by the thoroughly bemused English satirical artist Ralph Steadman, Thompson dives into the dark heart of Kentucky, searching for the perfect ugly mug for Steadman to caricature for the article. Which strange specimen of humanity haunting the infield and boxes of Churchill Downs would suit the task? Their search takes them through the absurd circus surrounding the Derby, a world in which the spirit of the Jim Crow South seems alive and well heedless of the world changing outside, where Kentucky Colonels ralph their lunches into the urinals (but still try to keep the mess off their white suits), where the powerful preside from their exclusive boxes and the rest make asses out of themselves. Thompson and Steadman come out the other side stinking of booze, mace, and vomit.

Thompson doesn't just skewer the locals on his satirical wit -- he was, after all, one of them -- but also himself. The end of the story shows that by coming to laugh at the circus, he ended up more or less being one of the clowns he was looking for himself. When he gazes drunkenly into a mirror at the denouement of the story, he realizes the ugly mug he was looking for was his own.

There's no such thing as being a perfect observer to events. You always, inevitably, become a part of them yourself. And when you wrestle a pig, you both get covered in shit -- but the pig likes it. Not much changes in America, and I'm appreciative that this read put that in perspective for me.

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story is cited as the first work of gonzo journalism, a highly entertaining style of immersion journalism which takes liberties with objectivity and factual detail for comedic effect or heightened narrative impact. The Kentucky Derby is more setting than subject of the story. It’s Thompson attempting to throw together coverage of the horse race at the last minute for Scanlan’s Monthly, a magazine that existed less than a year. So, the story is as much Thompson racing around trying to con his way into some press passes as he and the graphic artist sent by the magazine go on a booze-fueled junket on and around the race track grounds.

The story is laugh-out-loud funny in places, and features Thompson’s irreverent and fast-paced style throughout. It really was something new. Thompson, apparently, thought he’d failed completely when he sent in the story, but the response indicated that – rather - he’d invented something new, something for which there would be a huge market.

It’s definitely worth reading this story, just don’t expect deep insight into the horse racing tradition of Kentucky.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short read, just a newspaper article, but worth the thirty minutes in every sense possible.
I read this after learning who Thompson is—borderline idolizing him— and reading fear and loathing in Las Vegas, so I had a decently solid base on Thompson and his work. I came in with the expectations of this being the same tale as fear and loathing, Thompson recalling an acid soaked tale in the most epic ways possible. Instead this is a mint julip drowned recounting of the gilded southern culture surrounding the Kentucky derby.
In my opinion, The Kentucky Derby is Decedent and Depraved is a phenomenal article illustrating not only Kentucky Derby culture, but the culture of the 70’s as a whole. Beautiful work.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quintessential Hunter S Thompson gonzo journalism. What I find so interesting about this style of writing is it's hard to tell what's real or not because it all seems so real. He apparently submitted this thinking it was a terrible piece of writing and consequently ended up sparking gonzo journalism itself. One of the scenes towards the beginning of the story where he met "Jimbo" at the bar was particularly memorable for me. It's just something about fitting every spectator at the Derby into one heuristic of a person I find so funny. This story is just plain funny.

[Shanwar Badr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anticlimactic by today's standards but an entertaining article nonetheless.
Hunter S. Thompson is the quintessential outsider who loves to make himself the quintessential insider. In his eyes, the Kentucky Derby was never about the horses but rather the real beasts on the stands.
Hunter & Ralph set out to expose the breed of "sub-humans" who attended the derby for what the are only to find out they were just as decadent and depraved as their subjects.
Pure Gonzo journalism, worth the read.

[Daniel León · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un artículo corto y una completa locura que supuso el origen del periodismo gonzo. Thompson tenía que informar del derby de Kentucky, y en su lugar uso sus notas para escribir sobre la fea realidad que veía a través de sus ojos y los problemas que él mismo causó. Una de las partes más memorables es cuando convence a un hombre gordo al que apoda "Jimbo" de que los Black Panthers van a atacar el derby junto con otros grupo y le aterra.

[Gaurav · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There he was, by God--a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature...like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother's family photo album. It was the face we'd been looking for--and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible... "


LOL. How have I not read anything by Hunter Thompson for so long?! Absolutely loved this article.

[Daniel Escobar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo importante no es lo que se va a ver, sino lo que implica ir a verlo.

La narración de Thompson es desde la órbita y no desde el centro, narra y no-narra el derby de Kentucky y pone en carne viva lo que es ir a verlo. No importa la carrera, pueden prescindir de ella, pero la carrera es la principal razón para estar ahí.

[Alexandra Hampton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this. It’s wild and “different” which makes it beautiful! I love the imagery he helps us visualize. The language is in such a way that even you know when it’s all supposed to come out in one breath. I think it’s fantastic. Truly amazing!

[Tyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Based on how people talk about this article, I was expecting something really good. I found it very underwhelming. Aside from one or two brief encounters, the writing isn't particularly vivid or interesting

[Džiugas Babenskas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps when you’ve lived your life staring down the American Dream and unflinchingly seeing it for the twisted, scabrous thing it is, or can become, then maybe you let a part of it into you. The abyss gazes also.

[Allen]

As a reader not from the generation when the Derby took place, I have not seen Hunter S. Thompson in video or have heard his voice, it is unsurprising that my mental picture of the author is Johnny Depp not from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but as Jack Sparrow, sleazy and drunk of whiskey.

[Chance · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m hooked. Hunter S. Thompson an infamous writer, and after reading this short bit of his work, I can see why. And more than that, I will be reading more. This is some of the stickiest, most entertaining “non-fiction” I’ve read in a long time.

[TopBob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding.

This packed Derby feels claustrophobic with all the vivid characters that Thompson effortlessly conjures. There’s a real sense of place, and a real sense that this place is fundamentally alien.

Ties together at the end nicely too, I won’t spoil!

[kandyapple]

Everything but the Derby. Manic impulse is shot through with witty insight into the human animal as it races across Middle America.

Maybe that’s too deep, and Thompson just wants a drink. Yet, this reveals everything: a well-meaning frustration at the cultural decadence masking real political depravity.

[Khalid Al Khalili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a short read and it had me chuckling. Thompson is a beast.

[Michael Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheer debauchery. Wonderful.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

truly very funny. that poor british cartoonist... i bet he never had a better time in his life though.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious. To find a Kentucky Colonel, just go to the clubhouse men's rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomiting into urinals.