LockerRoom:  They bet in a foreign language in America but still it was easy to be impressed by the news that Giacomo, the winner of Saturday's Kentucky Derby, came in at 50 to 1. Had you done something so exotic as having a pari mutuel bet of $2 on Giacomo you would have got $102.60 back.

Of course had you heard the horse was named after Sting's nine-year-old son you probably wouldn't have bothered but that's a matter of taste. The second-placed nag, Closing Argument, came in at 72 to 1.

(Incidentally, extensive research reveals the longest-odds Kentucky Derby in the long and surely sinful history of pari mutuel betting was Donerail in 1913. For your two-buck bet back then you'd have walked away with $184.90. Given that Churchhill Downs, where the Derby gets run, is a plain, oval track with no jumps, you have to consider the possibility that Donerail was actually missing a limb to be given such long odds.) I love the Kentucky Derby and that affection comes with the expertise that goes with having actually been there. Once.

Big mistake really. As a youngster I always assumed the Kentucky Derby was some sort of sister event to the Augusta Masters, wherein refined people went along to deliberately experience the sensation of being stifled by tradition and overcome by opulence. The kind of thing I was born and bred to. Then I read Hunter Thompson's classic account of a day at the Downs and came to appreciate that people go to Churchill Downs to be stifled by hubris and overcome by drunks. The kind of thing I've got used to.

So for some reason, when we went we brought the children. Now we don't believe in hell but if there turns out to be one we will be sent there because the rap sheet will note that, yes, they brought their kids to the infield of the Kentucky Derby. Guilty!

We brought them to the infield of the Kentucky Derby, the one outdoor venue that most resembles an especially bad and decadent day during the last days of the Roman Empire.

Honestly, you haven't lived till you've held your child's hand in yours as you both pass by a women in her 50s who is naked apart from the hat and is reclining and cooing deliriously as she is being held happily in a sort of fireman's chair made by two male volunteers while a third man, naked also but not cooing, provides her with standing stud services. There seems to be a queue for this job but otherwise almost everyone else is too drunk to notice - except your inquisitive gosling, who finds it all hilarious and says, "Look, look. What are they doing with that lady?"

Fortunately, the child has an enlightened father. If you are wondering what you would have said, well, apparently the correct answer is, "Run along and find your mother now."

The late-evening fornication scenes were just one element of a grotesque, bizarre, unusual but precedented day. The Derby is the sort of event Irish insurance prices would preclude ever happening. The race runs around in a sort of oval and the organisers just pack the infield with over 100,000 people who come to lie in the sun and take drink in the sun.

To get into the infield you need nothing more than the ability to arrive early and queue for eternity and then drink for hours and hours.

The race, well the only race anyone is remotely interested in, happens late in the afternoon.

The crowd, having been introduced to the infield early in the morning, have long since lost the ability to distinguish a horse from a tree or any type of flora from fauna (funny enough, that woman told an acquaintance over dinner later that her name was actually Flora.) The sun beats down all day long. People drink beer in amounts at once heroic and unwise. Then there are the mint juleps.

Mint juleps! Can there be a more playful way of getting large amounts of whisky (well, bourbon) down you? Apparently more than 50,000 mint juleps are consumed on Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby day.

In economics class this might cause interesting debate. Does the prohibitive price of mint juleps bring elasticity of demand into play? When we were there half a decade ago the MJs were eight bucks a shot (plus a 20-minute queue) so we consumed no more than six apiece (well, we were driving). We noted the hoi polloi generally favoured drinking oceans of lager. And yet upwards of 50,000 mint juleps in an afternoon is a fine figure, the sort of action Mr Julep must have dreamt off when he invented the drink.

Perhaps mint juleps are what our economics teacher called a Giffen good, one of those staples upon which people make it a priority to spend an ever-increasing proportion of income regardless of price rises. (For the benefit of students facing exams at second and third level this column will be available in downloadable form with notes and critique by JK Galbraith.) (Incidentally (sorry, we have a euro surplus worth of brackets or parentheses to give away today), this morning during our heroic research into the subject of mint juleps we were interested to learn of the controversy raging to this day about the precise formula for the drink.

The most bracing and fundamentalist contribution to this debate has come from an expert name Henry Watterson (well, well), who recommended, "Pour the whiskey into a well-frosted silver cup. Throw the other ingredients away. Drink.") Many people seemed to follow what we shall call the Watterson Formula when we were there.

Apart from the two-minute spectacle of the Derby itself (a blurry flash of silks even for the sober), there was mass boob flashing and an impressive performance of diving for the inebriated as the crowd discovered a huge mud puddle caused by a busted pipe and an adjacent building with a high-enough roof to make jumping into the mire just the sort of operation which would draw either applause or a long period in rehab.

And still the Kentucky Derby has its charm as one of the few great sports events not completely sanitised and corporatised to within an inch of its life. It's big and robust and dirty and a bit of a rip-off when it comes to the mint juleps but there's all human life there.

It reminded me in essence of the old FA Cup back in its hey day. You still get good, romantic stories out of the 600 or so aspiring owners of three-year-olds who pay the Derby's early nomination fee each January. This year's winner was a 50 to 1 shot. Last year's winner, the beloved Smarty Jones, was owned by a decrepit car dealer (the cars and the dealer) and the horse wasn't even bred for the derby.

Smarty Jones's first trainer was murdered (with his wife, by a lunatic stepson). The car dealer opted to get out of horseracing but couldn't bring himself to part from Smarty Jones. He found a new trainer who, shall we say, had spent too much time enjoying the infield of life. The horse nearly killed itself at one race when it reared up unwisely while still within the starting gate.

Every year the Derby throws up stories like that, which the public latches onto.

Two years ago it was Funny Cide. This year it was Afleet Alex, who seemed solely connected to humans who are suffering from cancer.

There was a record crowd there this year, just over 156,000. The race took just over two minutes. In terms of the ratio of drinks consumed to duration of sporting action is this a record? Not if you'd been on some of the dates I was on when I was younger, believe me.