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Who really said it

The Race Is Not Always to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong; But That Is the Best Way to Bet

Not Damon Runyon — actually Hugh E. Keough Hugh E. Keough 1864–1912 · Chicago sportswriter, “In the Wake of the News”
Disputed Free to reuse

Keough signed himself HEK in the Chicago Tribune, and the line appears as a page epigram in “By Hek” in the Wake of the News ↗, the collection his friend Hugh S. Fullerton assembled after his death in 1912, in the form “The race is not always to the swift, but that is where to look.” The betting wording is credited to him by Franklin P. Adams in Collier’s in February 1919. Runyon, Adams, Grantland Rice and Burns Mantle all used the joke; every one of them named Keough.

Last verified 25 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“The Race Is Not Always to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong; But That Is the Best Way to Bet” Hugh E. Keough (1864–1912), Chicago sportswriter, as quoted by Franklin P. Adams in Collier's, 8 February 1919. Widely credited to Damon Runyon, who quoted it and named Keough. Traced by quotle.info · Verbatim: “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Damon Runyon. Use the credit shown above instead.

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In context

Evoking the world of Hugh E. Keough — Chicago sportswriter and racing official. Theme: "The Race Is Not Always to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong; But That Is the Best Way to Bet". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The Race Is Not Always to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong; But That Is the Best Way to Bet". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Earliest attestation
1912 — a page epigram in Keough’s posthumous collection
The book
“By Hek” in the Wake of the News: A Collection of the Writings of the Late Hugh Edmund Keough, comp. Hugh S. Fullerton (Chicago, 1912)
The betting wording
Franklin P. Adams, “Demobilizing Washington”, Collier’s, 8 February 1919, p. 9 — crediting Keough
The joke it answers
Ecclesiastes 9:11 (King James Version)

The race is not always to the swift, but that is where to look. "By Hek" in the Wake of the News, 1912

That is the 1912 wording, read directly from the Internet Archive’s scan of the Library of Congress’s copy ↗ of Keough’s collection, where it stands as an epigram at the head of a page (page twelve, per Quote Investigator ↗). The familiar betting form — “nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet” — is the one Franklin P. Adams attributed to Keough in Collier’s in 1919. The word best, in the version most often quoted today, belongs to neither of those printings.

The 1912 collection
Keough’s posthumous collection, scanned from the Library of Congress copy
"By Hek" in the Wake of the News (1912) at the Internet Archive

How we verified this

  • We read the primary book. “By Hek” in the Wake of the News ↗ (Chicago, 1912), compiled and edited by Hugh S. Fullerton and catalogued at the Internet Archive as scanned from a Library of Congress copy, carries a pithy line at the head of each page. One of them reads, in full: “The race is not always to the swift, but that is where to look.”
  • Quote Investigator ↗ traces the betting wording to Franklin P. Adams in Collier’s: The National Weekly of 8 February 1919, page 9 — where Adams does not claim it: “As Hugh Keough used to say: ‘The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.’”
  • Runyon disclaimed it twice. QI records a 1939 Runyon column quoting the “where to look” adage out of a well-thumbed Keough volume, and a 1945 column in which Runyon complains about Bartlett’s giving the line to Adams: “only I think Hughy Keough said it first … when Bartlett’s prints something, I want it accurate because Bartlett’s is one of my favorite sources of thievery and I like to know who I am stealing from.”
  • Wikipedia’s article on Hugh Keough ↗ (24 January 1864 – 9 June 1912) credits him with the quip in exactly the wording this page carries, and confirms he wrote the Chicago Tribune’s “In the Wake of the News” column under the monogram HEK. It cites Quote Investigator for the attribution, so it is a second telling of the same research rather than independent evidence.
  • The joke is a rejoinder to scripture: Ecclesiastes 9:11 in the King James Version ↗ reads “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … but time and chance happeneth to them all.” QI shows the wisecrack forming against it from 1833 onwards.
Public domain

Both documented printings are comfortably clear of US copyright: Keough’s collection was published in 1912 and Adams’s Collier’s piece in 1919, and everything first published in the United States before 1931 is in the public domain. The 1912 volume is freely readable at the Internet Archive, scanned from a Library of Congress copy. Ecclesiastes 9:11 is quoted here from the King James Version, also public domain. This is not legal advice.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

This is an unusually well-behaved misattribution: every famous writer who used the line said whose it was. The credit drifted anyway, because reference books recorded the messenger.

Damon Runyon Quoter, not author

Runyon quoted the adage in a 1939 column explicitly about how good Keough’s writing was, reading it out of a Keough volume he owned. Edmund Fuller’s Thesaurus of Epigrams then printed it under Runyon’s name in 1943, and it stuck. Wikiquote’s Runyon page ↗ does not carry it at all.

Franklin P. Adams Popularizer, not author

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations gave Adams a version of the line — and Runyon wrote a whole column in 1945 to complain, as QI records ↗: “only I think Hughy Keough said it first.” Adams himself had credited Keough in both 1916 and 1919.

Grantland Rice and Burns Mantle Early user

Rice ascribed the saying to “Hek” in June 1919 and the drama critic Burns Mantle to “Hughie Keogh” in 1924 — misspelling the name, but pointing at the right man.

“the best way to bet” Later variant

The documented 1919 form is “but that is the way to bet”, and the 1912 form is “but that is where to look.” The superlative is a later smoothing, though it is now the commonest version and the one Wikipedia ↗ prints.

Ecclesiastes 9:11 Ancestor

The straight line is scripture — “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong” ↗ — and people had been contradicting it in print since at least 1833, when Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine offered “ninety-nine times in a hundred”. Keough’s contribution was the punchline, not the premise.

The line is Hugh E. Keough’s. Runyon said so himself, in print, twice — see Quote Investigator ↗ — and the earliest printing sits in his own 1912 collection ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

Keough was a racing man before he was a columnist, and the joke is a bettor’s joke: scripture says the race is not to the swift, and he agrees — while pointing out that you still have to put money on something. It is the whole argument between faith and odds, in one sentence.

What makes the misattribution worth a page is that nobody committed it deliberately. Runyon, Adams, Rice and Mantle each quoted Keough by name. The credit shifted only when a reference book copied the quotation without the attribution around it.

Every famous writer who used the line said whose it was. The reference books lost the footnote.

Read the full story

Keough died in June 1912 at forty-eight, after six weeks of pneumonia. Hugh S. Fullerton put together “By Hek” in the Wake of the News that December, a small book for the writer’s friends, with one of his lines at the top of every page. That is the artefact almost everything downstream rests on: Runyon was still carrying a copy in 1939, and described it as “well-thumbed”.

The full chain Quote Investigator assembles runs from an 1833 Blackwood’s squib through an 1861 newspaper miscellany, a Wanamaker’s shoe advertisement in 1899 and a threshing-machine trade journal in 1907, to a banner across the Chicago Tribune’s sports page on 2 March 1912 — over a column signed H. E. K. That banner and the December book are the two 1912 citations on which the attribution to Keough rests.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Wisdom Success Doubt

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator — this sayingquoteinvestigator.com

The investigation this page defers to: the 1912 and 1919 Keough citations, the 180-year prehistory, and Runyon’s own 1945 objection to the misattribution.
Internet Archive — "By Hek" in the Wake of the News (1912)archive.org

Keough’s posthumous collection, scanned from the Library of Congress copy. The saying appears as a page epigram; this is the earliest printing we read ourselves.
Wikipedia — Hugh Keoughen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the sportswriter the line belongs to (1864–1912), Chicago Tribune, "In the Wake of the News", signed HEK.
Wikipedia — Damon Runyonen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the writer the line is popularly credited to — who credited Keough.
Wikiquote — Damon Runyonen.wikiquote.org

Runyon’s sourced quotation page. It does not carry this line in any section — noted here because the absence is part of the case.
Wikisource — Ecclesiastes (King James Version)en.wikisource.org

The verse the joke answers: "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong" (9:11).

The author

About Hugh E. Keough

Hugh E. Keough

1864–1912 · Chicago sportswriter and racing official

Hugh Edmund Keough (24 January 1864 – 9 June 1912) was born in Hamilton, Canada West, started in newspapers at seventeen and worked at them for thirty-one years, ending as the Chicago Tribune’s sports columnist, where he wrote In the Wake of the News and signed off “HEK”. He spent part of his career as an official at horse-racing tracks across the Midwest and South, which is audible in almost everything he wrote. He died of pneumonia in Chicago at forty-eight; friends printed a small collection of his lines the same year, and sportswriters were still quoting them decades later.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The earliest documented source (Chicago)

Keough, Hugh Edmund. “By Hek” in the Wake of the News: A Collection of the Writings of the Late Hugh Edmund Keough. Compiled and edited by Hugh S. Fullerton. Chicago, 1912. Page epigram: “The race is not always to the swift, but that is where to look.” The betting wording is credited to Keough by Franklin P. Adams, “Demobilizing Washington,” Collier’s: The National Weekly, 8 February 1919, 9.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Race Is Not Always to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong; But That Is the Best Way to Bet’?” Last verified 25 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-race-is-not-always-to-the-swift-nor-the-battle-to-the/

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