American turtle racing has a quirky—and controversial—history

On the face of it, a turtle race does not sound especially thrilling. And yet, for those who have seen a group of turtles placed in the center of a circle “hurry” toward the outer edge, the appeal is immediate. It’s silly, suspenseful, and strangely absorbing, the kind of entertainment that seems to belong to an earlier era.

Turtle racing is a small but persistent piece of Americana. Popularized in the early 20th century, the practice (sometimes called a “terrapin derby”) spread through county fairs, Wild West shows, and eventually city bars across the United States. In 1930, Baltimore Sun even claimed that associates of Al Capone once purchased 5,000 turtles for races in Chicago speakeasies, only to release them when the animals proved less cooperative than expected.

Nearly a century later, turtle racing now enjoys a shell of its former popularity. Where it does endure, communities are increasingly confronting a question that never used to come up: What exactly does a turtle race mean for the turtles themselves?

Enter the turtle task force

Alex Heeb’s fascination with turtles began early. When he was 14, he befriended a three-legged box turtle living on his family’s farm in southeast Missouri, observing its movements and learning how turtles behave in the wild. The interest stuck.

Years later, as an adult, Heeb began noticing turtle races at small-town festivals near his home. Then he saw another. And another. “I had gone to a festival and seen a turtle race, and then I went to another festival, and there was a turtle race there as well,” he recalls. “I got to wondering, ‘How many of these things are there?’”

That question led Heeb, now 35 and working as a computer scientist, to found a group called the Turtle Race Task Force. Beginning in 2019, Heeb and more than a hundred volunteers began documenting turtle races across the country, focusing largely on fairs, festivals, and small towns.

The effort built on earlier work by Sarah Reeb, an amateur naturalist who tracked 30 turtle races in Kansas in 1998. But social media allowed Heeb’s project to scale far beyond what had previously been possible.

“There were more than anybody realized,” Heeb says. “Thousands of turtles were involved in these races.”

How turtle races took hold

The foundational hub of turtle racing was the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch near Ponca City, Oklahoma. The massive cattle operation eventually diversified into Western entertainment, hosting rodeos and novelty spectacles alongside figures like vaudeville actor Will Rogers and famed cowboy Bill Pickett.

In 1924, the ranch added turtle racing to its repertoire. According to Albert Stehno, a historian and antiquarian with the 101 Ranch Collectors Association, the first race drew 214 turtles. Two years later, there were more than 2,300. By 1928, the field had grown to roughly 5,000 entrants, based on ranch records and promotional materials. “The winner in ‘27 cleared the 75-foot outer circle in one minute and 28 and a half seconds,” Stehno says, earning a silver cup and $3870 in the process. Even as the 101 Ranch began folding in 1931, turtle races began to spread outwards, from fairs to towns, and eventually to cities.

One branch of turtle racing moved indoors, becoming a bar attraction—especially in cities like Chicago. “Anytime you want to go to a bar, everybody’s going to the goofy bars that had some gimmick,” says Rich Crowley, interim president of the Chicago Herpetological Society, who has fielded media questions about turtle races for decades. “It was an attractor.”

Bar races were louder, more visible, and sometimes accompanied by informal betting, but as time went on, attraction faded. Crowley notes that these events often used a consistent group of turtles, and long-term captivity posed its own challenges.

“Turtles live long as hell,” he says.

(Painted turtles survive months under ice by breathing out of their butts.)

Small town America still loves racing turtles

Today, turtle races have faded from cities, but they are still fixtures across the central U.S. From 2019 to 2021, Heeb’s group conducted what is likely the most comprehensive survey of modern turtle races ever assembled. They identified 615 annual races in 30 states and cataloged more than 10,000 turtles at 268 races observed in person. The findings were published in a peer-reviewed academic journal in 2024.

What emerged was a clear pattern: The overwhelming majority of turtle races take place at municipal fairs and festivals, clustered heavily in the Great Plains region, peaking around July 4th. “That’s the craziest day,” Heeb says. “There are more than a hundred turtle races happening on the same day.”

While some small towns only race turtles once a year, others make it a regular tradition. In Nisswa, Minnesota, turtle races have been held every Wednesday afternoon since 1963. Organized by the local chamber of commerce, the races are a cornerstone of the town’s summer season, drawing hundreds of attendees regularly.

Families plan vacations around the event, and local businesses depend on the crowds it brings. “A lot of people are like, ‘I don’t even know what Nisswa would be without the turtle races,’” says Kalie VanVickle, president of the Nisswa Chamber of Commerce.

True to form, the races run on a predictable schedule. “It’s every Wednesday at two o’clock during the summer,” she adds. “You can count on it.”

(Meet Chonkosaurus, the internet’s famous snapping turtle.)

The risks beneath the spectacle

For all their charm, turtle races pose risks that are easy to overlook. Heeb’s team documented turtles being handled and dropped by participants by accident, which can cause internal damage, or racing on hot asphalt.

“Turtles begin to overheat at roughly 104 degrees Fahrenheit,” Heeb says. “There was a turtle race I went to in Texas where they were racing turtles on 140-degree asphalt.” The cold-blooded reptiles rely on the environment to regulate their internal body temperature; without shade or nearby water, extreme heat can cause physiological harm.

At another race, he witnessed a turtle suffering what appeared to be heat stroke. “It was frothing at the mouth,” he says. “Temperature is a real concern, among many other concerns.”

The group also recorded instances of turtles fighting due to close confinement, racing while injured, or being decorated with paint or glue, making them more visible to predators once released.

Disease, displacement, and what happens after

Aside from race conditions and practices, disease is of particular concern not only to the turtles in the race, but to turtles in the wild. While some towns like Nisswa offer captive turtles for rent, historically, racing turtles are wild-caught and returned to the outdoors post-race. Removing turtles from their habitat, keeping them for days or weeks before a race, and then releasing them after the event concludes can open the door to harmful bacteria and viruses.     

“Many of these turtle diseases involve shedding with contact,” explains Sharon Deem, expert in infectious diseases and Director of the Saint Louis Zoo Institute for Conservation Medicine. “Let’s say one turtle has mycoplasma or ranavirus or herpes virus. Now suddenly 29 others have been exposed.”

When turtles are released after races—sometimes far from where they were collected—that can be an increased risk factor. “From an epidemiology standpoint,” Deem says, “you can see how that can impact naïve populations or spread diseases into new areas.”

Deem acknowledges that turtle races can spark curiosity and affection, particularly among children. “I do see some of the positives: getting people enthusiastic about turtles and caring about turtles,” she says. “I don’t have the data, but based on what we know, the chances that turtles involved in a race will survive for a year or two or three are probably low.” Disease, displacement, and distress from the race all impact the reptiles’ chances of survival.

Crawling toward change

Turtle races aren’t a dead pastime (yet), but for all of these reasons, modern races and their administrators are facing scrutiny. “That's not to say that there aren't some really good turtle race organizers out there,” Heeb says. “They proved the point that you can have a responsible turtle race. It's just that, as it is, most of them are not doing that.”

In Nisswa, for example, a local nonprofit takes care of the town’s turtles, which live on a local farm. “We take incredibly seriously the safety and well-being of the turtles,” VanVickle says. The town adapted their practices after the Minnesota state government passed regulations around commercial turtle trapping, amid pressure from conservation groups like Heeb’s.

For Heeb, the goal is not to eliminate turtle races outright, but to change how they’re run. That’s the reasoning that led the task force to change its name to the Turtle Conservation Group, as well. “We wanted to actually reach out to turtle race organizers and work with them to make their events more conservation-friendly,” he says.

For now, turtle racing occupies a narrowing middle ground: part folk tradition and part curiosity, moving forward at exactly the pace you’d expect.