The tortoise simply isn’t born with the same leg-up as the hare. Where the hare can easily leap 5 feet in one stride, the tortoise struggles with all it has to make it 5 inches.

Each branch, each rock, each ditch that gets in the way, the tortoise painstakingly makes its way around, so careful not to trip or fall or lose it’s place. The course they’ve set up has a lot of those obstacles— challenges the participants must overcome to advance, a fair playing field, the game makers reassure.

But the hare is designed to hop over the ditch, the rock, the branch with ease. The hare is built for this kind of course, with the strong legs and fast heart inherited from his mom and his dad and all of the hares before him. It’s a gift he was bestowed from birth, no price tag attached.

Herein lies the problem. It’s true that course is the same, for the tortoise and the hare. But the course is designed for the hare’s strong legs, and fast heart, and gifts he did not have to fight for. The tortoise can struggle and strive and swerve with all its might, and sometimes it might get past that finish line first, but the hare has always had the advantage. No matter how many times he stops and meanders from the path to the finish line, no matter the detours and the dallying, the hare will always have the advantage. It’s a fact built into the bones of the race course.

Another race begins. The tortoise lifts its legs like lead, meeting each roadblock head on, while the hare gets distracted by an insect buzzing some meters behind. And yet still, as it often goes, the hare wins. The tortoise sweats and struggles and struggles some more, and the hare, once it tires of its distraction, hops swiftly past it on its long-inherited legs.

It’s a race that’s been rigged from the start, at the end of the day.