According to one interlocutor on a recent whistle-stop tour to Middle America, a former journalist with the Boston Globe, they are both trying to take on sports events at the very limit of what their facilities can handle.

In the case of Keeneland, it is the season-ending Breeders’ Cup series of championship races, worth a combined $26 million, which is coming to this bastion of the thoroughbred breeding industry for the first time since its foundation in 1984.

As a recent Keeneland race-day programme puts it: “Keeneland prides itself on hospitality and customer service and is emphasising a quality experience for fans over a quantity of fans”.

Even so, regulars suggest that the estimated daily attendance of 42-45,000 “patrons” will have this charming, well-organised venue - just up the road from the Kentucky Horse Park that next week hosts the big Rolex Kentucky three-day event - straining at the seams.

In Boston’s case, the event is of course the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, which the New England city is bidding for.

“It’s a small town,” as the former Globe writer told me.

But it is a small town with a hugely affluent east-coast catchment area.

And just as no city on earth is more thoroughly steeped in the horse business than Keeneland’s home town of Lexington, so Boston has put down the deepest of roots in many core Olympic events from basketball to the marathon.

In the new, potentially more flexible, Olympic world ushered in by Agenda 2020, moreover, it looks very likely that these events will once again come to include baseball.

This, of course, is the activity for which the city’s Red Sox are one of the best-known franchises of all, and whose 103-year-old Fenway Park stadium, with its Fenway Frank hot-dogs and Green Monster left-field wall, is one of world sport’s great traditional venues.

One of the few baseball venues that can rival Fenway for history is Wrigley Field, still delightful home of the Chicago Cubs, where I was fortunate enough to spend another evening of my US visit.

The ivy on the boundary wall had yet to show the first green shoots of spring and the stadium is in the middle of being redeveloped.

But the evening - which ended with the Cubs defeating the Cincinnati Reds 7-6, just as they did 99 years ago in the franchise’s first game at the then Weeghman Park - underlined how absurd it would have been to have staged a Summer Olympics in the Windy City without baseball.

Having said that, it also reminded me of one of the reasons why the sport lost its place on the Olympic programme after Beijing 2008, since stars such as Havana-born Jorge Soler, who hit two home runs, and Santo Domingo-born Arismendy Alcántara, who hit the single that delivered the winning run for the Cubs, might not have been available to represent their respective countries.

Two sun-kissed early spring days on the shores of Lake Michigan brought home what a fine Summer Games venue the city might have been had the chips fallen differently in the race for the 2016 Olympics against Tokyo, Madrid and victors Rio de Janeiro.

The pancake-flat landscape leaves Chicago devoid of the sensuous contours that make the Brazilian city so photogenic.

But there may well have been moments, as Rio has struggled with the monumental task of getting ready in time, when some in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) hierarchy might have wished members had not been seduced by the intelligent, well-marshalled and passionate Brazilian campaign.

One other observation from an enjoyable four days: busily as venues such as Keeneland and Wrigley Field have been redeveloping, nostalgia seems to remain as potent a marketing tool as ever when it comes to the product itself – at least among the predominantly white, middle-class audiences I chiefly found myself among.

The basic crowd experience at Wrigley, with its bawling beer and Vienna beef hotdog sellers and its “seventh inning stretch” sing-along, could have been lifted direct from the mid-1980s, when I lived ten blocks away - except perhaps for the prominent big screen and, of course, the lights that now permit night games.

So, I imagine, could Keeneland’s army of green-jacketed stewards and hunting horn.

And, away from sport, I picked up the same vibe at a Cracker Barrel restaurant of a type that, I was told, throngs US trunk roads, with its dishes of turnip greens and pinto beans on the menu, and skillets and rocking-chairs for sale in an adjoining Old Country Store.

It was like encountering a collective desire to return to an age of innocence - albeit innocence on America’s terms.

The nostalgia was shot through with a patriotic undercurrent that saw the Star-Spangled Banner sung with due decorum at the start of a baseball match between teams from two central US cities.

Later, a military man in full dress uniform was introduced and applauded vigorously during a break between innings.

I have noticed a similar tendency in recent times for British sports events to make a show of honouring the armed services.

It suggests to me that the nostalgia fix, which is part of some sports’ appeal, especially in the US, is anchored in a gnawing sense of insecurity at the complexity and unpredictability of the modern world.