Boonta Eve
Classic

The twin suns had not yet cleared the grandstands when the odds went up, and already the board told the only story the Hutts wanted told. Sebulba: three to two. The reigning champion, the Dug from Pixelito, was again the house's favorite — and the house, on Boonta Eve, is the Hutt Clan itself.

Podracing is not a sport here so much as an economy. The cam droids sell the spectacle off-world; the betting pits sell the danger at home. And there is a great deal of danger to sell. The Boonta Eve Classic carries the highest mortality rate of any podrace in the galaxy, a statistic the promoters print on the programs as a feature, not a warning.

Into that arithmetic came a variable no bookmaker had priced: a human boy. No human had ever finished this race — the reflexes required to thread a canyon at nine hundred kilometers an hour are, the physiologists insist, beyond the species. Anakin Skywalker, nine years old and owned by a Toydarian junk dealer, had built his pod from a discarded Radon-Ulzer and a pair of salvaged turbines.

"You can fix a race. You cannot fix the first turn. The first turn does not take bribes."

— Clegg Holdfast, pilot & broadcast correspondent

The first turn took its toll on schedule. By the Laguna Caves, on the opening lap, Ratts Tyerell was gone — the Aleena killed outright in a head-on collision in the dark of the rock, the kind of death the board had already counted on. Mawhonic went into the wall of the Canyon Dune Turn. Somewhere past the Hutt Flats, a Tusken sniper's slug found Teemto Pagalies's engine and ended his afternoon in a bloom of fire.

Sebulba raced the way he always has — with a flame vent here, a side-swipe there, a quiet understanding with the stewards that none of it would be seen. He has won this race by making sure his rivals did not finish it. For two laps the formula held. The boy hung in his wake, eating sand.

And then it didn't. What happened on the final lap will be argued in every cantina from here to Mos Eisley, but the board does not argue. It pays. When the Skywalker pod crossed the line at fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds, the favorite was a smear of wreckage on the back straight, and a great many Hutts were poorer than they had been at dawn. The first turn, as Holdfast says, does not take bribes.