Horse Racing History
The competitive racing
of horses is one of humankind's most ancient sports,
having its origins among the prehistoric nomadic
tribesmen of Central Asia who first domesticated
the horse about 4500 BC. For thousands of years,
horse racing flourished as the sport of kings and
the nobility. Modern racing, however, exists primarily
because it is a major venue for legalized gambling.
Horse racing is the second most widely attended
U.S. spectator sport, after baseball. In 1989,
56,194,565 people attended 8,004 days of racing,
wagering $9.14 billion. Horse racing is also a
major professional sport in Canada, Great Britain,
Ireland, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, and South America.
By far the most popular form of the sport is the
racing of mounted THOROUGHBRED horses over flat
courses at distances from three-quarters of a
mile to two miles. Other major forms of horse
racing are harness racing, steeplechase racing,
and QUARTER HORSE racing.
Thoroughbred Racing
By the time humans began to keep written records,
horse racing was an organized sport in all major
civilizations from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.
Both chariot and mounted horse racing were events
in the ancient Greek Olympics by 638 BC, and the
sport became a public obsession in the Roman Empire.
The origins of modern racing lie in the 12th century,
when English knights returned from the Crusades
with swift Arab horses. Over the next 400 years,
an increasing number of Arab stallions were imported
and bred to English mares to produce horses that
combined speed and endurance. Matching the fastest
of these animals in two-horse races for a private
wager became a popular diversion of the nobility.
Horse racing began to become a professional sport
during the reign (1702-14) of Queen Anne, when match
racing gave way to races involving several horses
on which the spectators wagered. Racecourses sprang
up all over England, offering increasingly large
purses to attract the best horses. These purses
in turn made breeding and owning horses for racing
profitable. With the rapid expansion of the sport
came the need for a central governing authority.
In 1750 racing's elite met at Newmarket to form
the Jockey Club, which to this day exercises complete
control over English racing.
The Jockey Club wrote complete rules of racing and
sanctioned racecourses to conduct meetings under
those rules. Standards defining the quality of races
soon led to the designation of certain races as
the ultimate tests of excellence. Since 1814, five
races for three-year-old horses have been designated
as "classics." Three races, open to male
horses (colts) and female horses (fillies), make
up the English Triple Crown: the 2,000 Guineas,
the Epsom Derby (see DERBY, THE), and the St. Leger
Stakes. Two races, open to fillies only, are the
1,000 Guineas and the Epsom Oaks.
The Jockey Club also took steps to regulate the
breeding of racehorses. James Weatherby, whose family
served as accountants to the members of the Jockey
Club, was assigned the task of tracing the pedigree,
or complete family history, of every horse racing
in England. In 1791 the results of his research
were published as the Introduction to the General
Stud Book. From 1793 to the present, members of
the Weatherby family have meticulously recorded
the pedigree of every foal born to those racehorses
in subsequent volumes of the General Stud Book.
By the early 1800s the only horses that could be
called "Thoroughbreds" and allowed to
race were those descended from horses listed in
the General Stud Book. Thoroughbreds are so inbred
that the pedigree of every single animal can be
traced back father-to-father to one of three stallions,
called the "foundation sires." These stallions
were the Byerley Turk, foaled c.1679; the Darley
Arabian, foaled c.1700; and the Godolphin Arabian,
foaled c.1724.
American Thoroughbred Racing
The British settlers brought horses and horse racing
with them to the New World, with the first racetrack
laid out on Long Island as early as 1665. Although
the sport became a popular local pastime, the development
of organized racing did not arrive until after the
Civil War. (The American Stud Book was begun in
1868.) For the next several decades, with the rapid
rise of an industrial economy, gambling on racehorses,
and therefore horse racing itself, grew explosively;
by 1890, 314 tracks were operating across the country.
The rapid growth of the sport without any central
governing authority led to the domination of many
tracks by criminal elements. In 1894 the nation's
most prominent track and stable owners met in New
York to form an American Jockey Club, modeled on
the English, which soon ruled racing with an iron
hand and eliminated much of the corruption.
In the early 1900s, however, racing in the United
States was almost wiped out by antigambling sentiment
that led almost all states to ban bookmaking. By
1908 the number of tracks had plummeted to just
25. That same year, however, the introduction of
pari-mutuel betting for the Kentucky Derby signaled
a turnaround for the sport. More tracks opened as
many state legislatures agreed to legalize pari-mutuel
betting in exchange for a share of the money wagered.
At the end of World War I, prosperity and great
horses like Man o' War brought spectators flocking
to racetracks. The sport prospered until World War
II, declined in popularity during the 1950s and
1960s, then enjoyed a resurgence in the 1970s triggered
by the immense popularity of great horses such as
Secretariat, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed, each winners
of the American Triple Crown--the KENTUCKY DERBY,
the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes. During the
late 1980s, another significant decline occurred,
however.
Thoroughbred tracks exist in about half the states.
Public interest in the sport focuses primarily on
major Thoroughbred races such as the American Triple
Crown and the Breeder's Cup races (begun in 1984),
which offer purses of up to about $1,000,000. State
racing commissions have sole authority to license
participants and grant racing dates, while sharing
the appointment of racing officials and the supervision
of racing rules with the Jockey Club. The Jockey
Club retains authority over the breeding of Thoroughbreds.
Breeding
Although science has been unable to come up with
any breeding system that guarantees the birth
of a champion, breeders over the centuries have
produced an increasingly higher percentage of
Thoroughbreds who are successful on the racetrack
by following two basic principles. The first is
that Thoroughbreds with superior racing ability
are more likely to produce offspring with superior
racing ability. The second is that horses with
certain pedigrees are more likely to pass along
their racing ability to their offspring.
Male Thoroughbreds (stallions) have the highest
breeding value because they can mate with about
40 mares a year. The worth of champions, especially
winners of Triple Crown races, is so high that groups
of investors called breeding syndicates may be formed.
Each of the approximately 40 shares of the syndicate
entitles its owner to breed one mare to the stallion
each year. One share, for a great horse, may cost
several million dollars. A share's owner may resell
that share at any time.
Farms that produce foals for sale at auction are
called commercial breeders. The most successful
are E. J. Taylor, Spendthrift Farms, Claiborne Farms,
Gainsworthy Farm, and Bluegrass Farm, all in Kentucky.
Farms that produce foals to race themselves are
called home breeders, and these include such famous
stables as Calumet Farms, Elmendorf Farm, and Green-tree
Stable in Kentucky and Harbor View Farm in Florida.
Betting
Wagering on the outcome of horse races has been
an integral part of the appeal of the sport since
prehistory and today is the sole reason horse
racing has survived as a major professional sport.
All betting at American tracks today is done under
the pari-mutuel wagering system, which was developed
by a Frenchman named Pierre Oller in the late 19th
century. Under this system, a fixed percentage (14
percent-25 percent) of the total amount wagered
is taken out for track operating expenses, racing
purses, and state and local taxes. The remaining
sum is divided by the number of individual wagers
to determine the payoff, or return on each bet.
The projected payoff, or "odds," are continuously
calculated by the track's computers and posted on
the track odds board during the betting period before
each race. Odds of "2-1," for example,
mean that the bettor will receive $2 profit for
every $1 wagered if his or her horse wins.
At all tracks, bettors may wager on a horse to win
(finish first), place (finish first or second),
or show (finish first, second, or third). Other
popular wagers are the daily double (picking the
winners of two consecutive races), exactas (picking
the first and second horses in order), quinellas
(picking the first and second horses in either order),
and the pick six (picking the winners of six consecutive
races).
Handicapping
The difficult art of predicting the winner of
a horse race is called handicapping. The process
of handicapping involves evaluating the demonstrated
abilities of a horse in light of the conditions
under which it will be racing on a given day. To
gauge these abilities, handicappers use past performances,
detailed published records of preceding races. These
past performances indicate the horse's speed, its
ability to win, and whether the performances tend
to be getting better or worse. The conditions under
which the horse will be racing include the quality
of the competition in the race, the distance of
the race, the type of racing surface (dirt or grass),
and the current state of that surface (fast, sloppy,
and so on). The term handicapping also has a related
but somewhat different meaning: in some races, varying
amounts of extra weight are assigned to horses based
on age or ability in order to equalize the field.
Harness Racing
The racing of horses in harness dates back to
ancient times, but the sport virtually disappeared
with the fall of the Roman Empire. The history
of modern HARNESS RACING begins in America, where
racing trotting horses over country roads became
a popular rural pastime by the end of the 18th
century. The first tracks for harness racing were
constructed in the first decade of the 19th century,
and by 1825 harness racing was an institution
at hundreds of country fairs across the nation.
With the popularity of harness racing came the development
of the STANDARDBRED, a horse bred specifically for
racing under harness. The founding sire of all Standardbreds
is an English Thoroughbred named Messenger, who
was brought to the United States in 1788. Messenger
was bred to both pure Thoroughbred and mixed breed
mares, and his descendants were rebred until these
matings produced a new breed with endurance, temperament,
and anatomy uniquely suited to racing under harness.
This new breed was called the Standardbred, after
the practice of basing all harness-racing speed
records on the "standard" distance of
one mile.
Harness racing reached the early zenith of its popularity
in the late 1800s, with the establishment of a Grand
Circuit of major fairs. The sport sharply declined
in popularity after 1900, as the automobile replaced
the horse and the United States became more urbanized.
In 1940, however, Roosevelt Raceway in New York
introduced harness racing under the lights with
pari-mutuel betting. This innovation sparked a rebirth
of harness racing, and today its number of tracks
and number of annual races exceed those of Thoroughbred
racing. The sport is also popular in most European
countries, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Steeplechase, Hurdle, and Point-To-Point Racing
Steeplechases are races over a 2- to 4-mi (3.2-
to 6.4-km) course that includes such obstacles
as brush fences, stone walls, timber rails, and
water jumps. The sport developed from the English
and Irish pastime of fox hunting, when hunters
would test the speed of their mounts during the
cross-country chase. Organized steeplechase racing
began about 1830, and has continued to be a popular
sport in England to this day. The most famous
steeplechase race in the world is England's Grand
National, held every year since 1839 at Aintree.
Steeplechase racing is occasionally conducted
at several U.S. Thoroughbred race tracks. The
most significant race is the U.S. Grand National
Steeplechase held yearly at Belmont Park.
Hurdling is a form of steeplechasing that is less
physically demanding of the horses. The obstacles
consist solely of hurdles 1 to 2 ft (0.3 to 0.6
m) lower than the obstacles on a steeplechase course,
and the races are normally less than 2 mi in length.
Hurdling races are often used for training horses
that will later compete in steeplechases. Horses
chosen for steeplechase training are usually Thoroughbreds
selected for their endurance, calm temperament,
and larger-than-normal size.
Point-to-point races are held for amateurs on about
120 courses throughout the British Isles. Originally
run straight across country (hence the name), these
races are now conducted on oval tracks with built-in
fences, often on farmland. |
