Sometimes the horse racing fan in me obscures the etiquette of when it is acceptable to depart your team’s losing effort. If a chosen horse isn’t performing as expected, there’s not long to suffer, unless you’re doing it on NBC while Bob Baffert is carried aloft on a golden litter to the highest reaches of the clouds.
People don’t leave a horse race while it’s still going on. There’s always hope. You hold your ticket, and if you don’t hold your ticket, you can always hold another drink. We may puke on your shoes in the grandstand or abandon our children in an attempt scratch out a living trying to guess which jockey actually ate half a raisin that day, but we have our standards.