Johannesburg was founded in 1886. This is generally accepted. What is less generally appreciated is that almost immediately afterwards, somebody decided that what the new city really needed was horse racing.
This was, in retrospect, an excellent decision.
Johannesburg had appeared rather suddenly, following the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand. It was not a city that evolved gently from a village, with generations of careful planning and perhaps a picturesque church at the centre.
It arrived.
And people arrived with it.
Gold-seekers, entrepreneurs, workers, adventurers and people who simply believed that somewhere in all this chaos there might be an opportunity arrived in their thousands. Within a decade, the population had grown from a few thousand fortune-seekers to more than 100,000. The city has been attracting people in search of work, reinvention, survival and opportunity ever since.
And then there were the horses.
The first horse race in Johannesburg was held in 1886, the same year the city burst into existence. In June 1887, the newly established Johannesburg Turf Club held its inaugural meeting, headlined by the Johannesburg Handicap over two miles.
The race was worth £250. It was also the forerunner of the Summer Cup.
This means that the Summer Cup is, in a very real sense, almost as old as Johannesburg itself.
Nobody appears to find this unusual.
By 1888, the Johannesburg Turf Club had made its permanent home at TAB Turffontein, and in 1892 the racecourse itself was established. The foundations of the original grandstand followed in 1893.
And so, while Johannesburg was busy becoming Johannesburg, TAB Turffontein was busy becoming the home of Johannesburg racing.
It has been doing so ever since.
Over the next 140 years, the city would become larger, wealthier, poorer, more sophisticated, more chaotic, more unequal, more cosmopolitan and considerably harder to navigate. It would acquire skyscrapers, mine dumps, shopping centres, suburbs, townships, financial districts, art galleries, restaurants, embassies, industrial corridors and enough roads to make the concept of a “short trip across Joburg” something between an optimistic prediction and a work of fiction.
TAB Turffontein, meanwhile, carried on.
The racecourse has survived gold mining beneath the ground, war, a concentration camp, changing city boundaries, changing racing fortunes, changing names and generations of Johannesburgers.
At one point, there was literally gold beneath the racecourse.
This seems unnecessarily ambitious, even by Johannesburg standards.
The city itself has changed almost beyond recognition since 1886. Its centre has shifted, new centres have emerged, communities have grown and moved, and the Highveld skyline has changed. The gold rush became a financial economy, and the mining city became a sprawling metropolis.
But some things have remained.
Horses still run at TAB Turffontein. People still gather there. The Summer Cup still arrives every November, bringing the city to the races in much the same way that it has for generations.
And the racecourse remains, in its own slightly improbable way, a miniature version of the city around it: ambitious, resilient, contradictory, occasionally chaotic, endlessly reinventing itself and somehow still standing.
Johannesburg is 140 years old this year. That is extraordinarily young for a city of its size and influence, but old enough to have acquired a considerable amount of history, several layers of mythology, an alarming number of roads and, apparently, a long-standing relationship with horses.
The city is still becoming.
TAB Turffontein is still racing.
And after 140 years, it seems there is no particular reason to expect either of them to slow down now.