Living For The Track
Cigar lover Michael Joyce is a horse racing analyst, on-air host and reporter for FanDuel TV. The 46-year-old has spent his entire career in racing and grew up in the business, initially working for his father at Wyoming Downs at the tender age of 12. He began working at TVG in 2001, a company that recently rebranded as FanDuel TV, and has covered races all over the United States and beyond, including the Kentucky Derby, his busiest day of the year. He’ll be on site at the race this year for FanDuel, which became an official partner of Churchill Downs in 2023.
Joyce was interviewed about his love of horse racing and cigars by Cigar Aficionado executive editor David Savona.
Savona: How long have you been smoking cigars?
Joyce: I really got into cigars right out of college. I’m the youngest of 13. My brother John is a legendary cigar smoker and a legendary dish doer. [After dinner] all the brothers would go into the kitchen. They would close the door, put on music and light up cigars while we did all the dishes and put away all the food. It was this smoke chamber of seven Joyce males all smoking cigars. I started smoking them right out of college when I first moved to L.A. When I’m on remote, I can smoke three a day.
Q: Do you smoke at the racetrack?
A: The racetrack is one of the last refuges for cigar smokers. You can walk around virtually the entire racetrack and smoke a cigar. It’s one of the few places where you can walk around and smoke. It’s totally acceptable and normal, and I kind of love it. Today, I go on the air around two o’clock, so I’ll get to the track at noon, and I’ll have a smoke while I’m prepping. I’ll have the racing form, I’ll have my cigar and it’s just part of my routine.
Q: What makes the Kentucky Derby such a special event in the world of horse racing?
A: If you ask anybody in the world what the biggest horse race in the world is, they’ll say the Kentucky Derby. If you ask anybody in the world what the second biggest horse race is, nobody will have the same answer, because nobody knows, ’cause there isn’t one—it doesn’t matter. It’s the Kentucky Derby and that’s it. It encapsulates a lot of things that make racing great.
Horse racing is like golf: it’s an endeavor where handicapping the horses is something you’ll never perfect. Playing golf, you’ll never perfect that game, you’re never going to shoot the perfect round. Horse racing is like that, it’s the ultimate mental challenge.
The reason the Kentucky Derby is such a fantastic representation of the sport is because it is the ultimate unknown of races. They’re all three-year-olds. You only get one shot at the Derby. It’s the first time they go a mile and a quarter; nobody in the field has ever gone that distance before. Three-year-old [horses] are still in the development phase. They are not a finished product. They are more akin to a college athlete than a professional athlete. Horses really hit their competitive peak [at age] four, five and six. It has a little bit of that NCAA tournament spectacle feel. Oftentimes you have 20 horses in the Kentucky Derby. Fourteen of them never pan out to be what they were . . . usually the top four or five horses in the Derby become something.
If you want to talk about the caliber of horses in a race, there are better races than the Kentucky Derby, sure, but there’s nothing like that two minutes in sports, there’s nothing like that spectacle. So many questions get answered. From the time a horse is born, the Kentucky Derby is a dream for everybody. I think there are 17,000 or 18,000 [race] horses born each year. Of those 18,000 only 20 make it to the Derby, that’s it. Every horse’s journey there is something you can write a book about.
It’s such a rich tapestry of storytelling to get to that one event. And in two minutes, anything can happen, especially in a 20-horse field. A horse might be the best horse by 10 lengths but if they have a bad trip or get caught in traffic—and there’s a ton of traffic—they won’t win.
Q: It’s January as we are speaking. At this point in time, do you have any idea who might be a player in the Derby?
A: I don’t think we’ve seen the Kentucky Derby winner yet. We’re so early in the process. It’s hard to tell at this point—I certainly haven’t identified my Derby horse.
Q: What’s your Derby Day ritual?
A: The Kentucky Derby isn’t just the biggest day of racing for Churchill Downs, it’s the biggest day for every racetrack in the country because they’re taking bets. If somebody’s not in Kentucky they’re going to go to their racetrack wherever they are to watch the Derby, bet on the Derby. They have live races at their race track. So it is a big day for everyone, it’s an all-hands-on-deck thing. If you work in horseracing, and you don’t work at Churchill Downs, it’s really hard to take that day off to go to Churchill for the Kentucky Derby.
I’m never going to repeat last year’s Derby. Last year, I was there all week. Derby Day I was on the air very early in the morning. We had a set. I was off for six hours in the middle of the day when NBC went live. As soon as I went off the air I went over and watched the entire day’s racing in a box under the twin spires with my brothers. My brother John had brought about a dozen Cohiba Esplendidos, which was fantastic.
Q: What got you into horse racing?
A: I was never in danger of becoming a doctor. I was always going to be at the track. My dad [Joe Joyce] was a racing executive. When I was born, he was the president of Arlington Park [outside of Chicago]. He created the world’s first million-dollar race, the Arlington Million, in 1981. My brothers taught me how to read on the racing form.
Dad was a workaholic. He sold his interest in Arlington, and his idea of retiring was to buy a racetrack in Wyoming and operate it. So, we moved to Wyoming when I was young. My dad put me to work for five dollars a night running strip photos, from the photo finish. That was the entry point to my career.
I’ve done every job at a racetrack that you can do: I was shoveling shit in the paddock in between races, I was a valet parker, I worked in concessions, I worked in the racing office . . . I would act as a hub manager for the OTB. I never worked with horses, I’ve never been a trainer or a jockey.
Q: You love your job, don’t you?
A: As long as there is a horse running in a circle, and you can place a wager on it, that’s what I’m going to do. I can’t imagine doing anything else.
