While emulating the N.F.L. might help in the short term, racing, like football (and boxing), faces difficulties in marketing to millennials a sport with significant health risks. And, unlike football and boxing, horse racing is hard to televise. The action is quickly over, like a boxing match scheduled to last for only one round, with long downtimes in between races, which NBC fills with B-roll footage, bios of trainers, and live shots of ladies in hats. It’s the opposite problem that baseball faces, with its three-hour-plus games.

Live, racing is much more exciting, and prestige racing venues like Saratoga continue to do well. This summer’s handle—the total amount wagered at the six-week meet—was $676.7 million, a record. Saratoga’s much shabbier sister racetrack, Aqueduct, is struggling, however, as are many regional tracks around the country. Gamblers prefer casinos to playing the ponies: slot machines are mindless; handicapping races takes study. New York State has accepted proposals to redevelop Belmont Park, the third of the New York Racing Association’s venues, and turn it into an entertainment destination, with a new on-site arena for pro sports (the Islanders and New York City F.C. are among the bidders) and concerts. Stuart Janney, the chairman of the Jockey Club, the breed registry for Thoroughbred horses in the U.S., characterized the state of the sport to me as “a tale of two cities—real success stories, and there’s also areas where racing is struggling.”

One reason often cited for the sport’s slow decline is that there is no Seabiscuit or Secretariat—a champion that the larger public can embrace. When, two years ago, American Pharoah won the Triple Crown, the first horse to do so since Affirmed, in 1978, the horse’s owner, the Egyptian-American entrepreneur Ahmed Zayat, of New Jersey, retired the three-year-old at the end of the season, and sold the breeding rights for a reported twenty million dollars, rather than allow the horse to continue racing. (Secretariat also retired as a three-year-old.) “The stars need to stick around longer,” Janney told me.

The performers who do stick around, year after year, are the jockeys. The N.Y.R.A. jockey colony, considered to be the Yankees of horse racing, already had two of the world’s top riders in John Velazquez and Javier Castellano before the Ortizes showed up. Now the colony has two young sporting phenoms, who, like the Williams sisters at their best, seem to compete on a different plane.

But, while jockeys are celebrated when they win, they are strangely invisible off the track in the Houyhnhnm-land of horse racing, where the animals are supposed to be the stars. When Velazquez won the 2017 ESPY Award for best jockey, the invitation to the ceremony from the sports network ESPN never got to him. “Shame no invite,” he tweeted the day after the awards show.

The Ortizes are superb athletes, and Jose told me that had he been bigger he would have tried to play baseball professionally. (Irad is five feet three inches, and Jose is five feet five, although he is listed as five-seven in the N.Y.R.A. program, and both weigh a hundred and fourteen pounds.) They have thickly muscled shoulders, knotty forearms, meaty hands (their hands are huge, in proportion to their size), absurdly slim waists, and slightly bowed legs. On horseback, they are imposing and haughty, until they turn on their matinée-idol smiles in the winner’s circle.

The adage is that racing is twenty per cent jockey and eighty per cent horse. If a horse wins by five lengths or more, it was the horse; the jockey only had to avoid mistakes, such as getting pinned on the rail or taking a turn too wide. But in close races the jockey’s tactics and riding skills can be decisive.

Silks—worn by jockeys to identify the owners of the horses they’re riding—in the Color Room, at Belmont Park. Photograph by Thomas Prior for The New Yorker

No horse can run flat out for a mile or more. (What makes the Churchill Downs track record that Secretariat set, at the 1973 Kentucky Derby, so remarkable is the fact that the champion ran each of the last four quarter miles in the race faster than the previous quarter.) The jockey’s main tactical decision is when to burn the horse’s energy and when to conserve it, by finding spaces inside the charging pack where his mount can settle in and switch off—that is, suppress the flight instinct that makes horses run in the first place, and relax in the security of the herd, saving fuel for the final turn and sprint. As Jose put it, “If they go slower, then I know they are going to have a little bit left. If you go fast early, then you slow down at the end. So, if I’m in the back of the pack and they’re going slower, I know I can ask for a little bit more. And if I have a really nice horse then I know I can be in the back and go slow and still win.”

In addition to tactical skills, jockeys must have a stopwatch in their heads. Riders can’t see a clock or hear the announcer’s call over the thundering hooves and the guttural grunts the horses make at full gallop, but, if the jockey’s internal clock can measure twelve seconds exactly, he can calculate how fast the race is going. Eddie Arcaro, a Hall of Fame jockey of the mid-twentieth century, who won the Kentucky Derby five times, would supposedly count to twelve wherever he was—the car, the kitchen, the bathroom—keeping his inner clock wound.

“You think about what these jockeys do,” the trainer Dale Romans said. “They’re in a squatted position, they’re going as fast as forty miles an hour, in a pack this far apart”—an inch separated his thumb and forefinger—“getting pelted with dirt, and they have to judge pace and look for holes.” They also have to think about the safety of the horses, in particular the delicate cannon bones, in their forelegs, which can shatter if they put a foot wrong.

Clancy, watching the live feed on the TV in our box at Saratoga, noted that the pace for the quarter mile was slow, and imagined what the brothers must be thinking: “There isn’t any other speed in the race that can beat them. So now they know it’s the two of them.”

Irad went to “the ask” as they started into the final turn, hitting Fortunate Queen on the right side of her sweat-slick neck with his whip. The standard jockey’s whip, a thirty-inch-long, leather-covered fibreglass shaft with a leather flap at the end, is used to override the animal’s nature, which is to remain in the safety of the pack, and ask it to go out front, where a predator could pick it off.

Irad hit Fortunate Queen again, and again—“strong urging” is the racing euphemism—signalling that, if he had any chance to win, now was the time. Jose, still in the hole between first and third, saw his brother go to the whip early, which told him that Irad was running out of horse, and he could keep Fairybrook switched off a little longer before asking for more. “Not every horse likes the whip,” Jose told me. “A lot of horses will run faster without it. You just show it to them and then”—he made a giddyap sound, like a loud kiss. “I couldn’t tell when I started, I just whipped them all, but now I can tell if he’s uncomfortable when I hit him. They tell you a lot with their ears. ” Both horses, being lesser mounts, did not respond to the whip with the burst that the brothers were used to from “live” horses, no matter how strong the urging.