Horse racing is one of mankind’s oldest sports, going back to the earliest days of recorded time. There has been a variety of types of racing and breeds of horses engaged in racing. Thoroughbreds are the most recognized breed of racehorses, but there are also quarter horses, Arabians, and standardbreds.
There are races over straight courses and oval tracks, from one-fourth mile to several miles. The standard distance of races is measured in furlongs; one furlong is one-eighth of a mile. Tracks may be grass or dirt. In addition to mounted races (called flats) and harness races, there are obstacle races called steeplechases.
Certain races command much more attention than others. These include the championship races known as the Triple Crown or Breeders Cup for thoroughbreds, the Breeders Crown and the Hambletonian for standardbreds (harness horses), and the American Futurity for quarter horses. There are horse races for two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and older horses. There are also maiden races for horses that have never won a race before. Other varieties of races include allowance and handicap races, stakes races, and claiming races.
The majority of states have some forms of race betting. Thirty-seven states allow thoroughbred racing, 27 states allow quarter horse racing, and 26 states have harness racing. Additionally, 25 states allow offtrack betting, and 39 states have intertrack betting facilities. Every Canadian province has pari-mutuel betting on horse races. The ten provinces and the Yukon permit harness racing, seven provinces and the Yukon allow thoroughbred racing, and nine provinces and the Yukon allow quarter horse race betting. All provinces and the Yukon permit intertrack betting as well as telephone betting and offtrack betting. There are also tracks in Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean island states of Antigua, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad.
In the United States approximately 6 percent of all gambling losses in 1998 were by pari-mutuel horse bettors (Christiansen 1999). Track winnings (and other moneys taken out of betting pools) totaled $3.3 billion in 1998. Although on-track betting has declined a great deal over the past three decades, the total amounts bet on horse races have increased slightly, going up an average of 2.3 percent a year since 1982. All gambling in the United States has increased 10.4 percent each year since 1982. There are approximately 150 tracks in the United States, with several of these operating only during short fair seasons. Canada has approximately forty tracks; most of them for harness racing events.
Gambling operations have supported racing ever since it became a popular form of entertainment. There is a variety of betting systems, but in modern times, the pari-mutuel system has replaced almost all other systems at the track in North America. Other systems included pooled and auction betting, as well as betting with bookies who guarantee odds of horses at time of bets. In recent years betting revenues have shown only minuscule growth, and tracks have sought other opportunities to gain revenues. They have benefited from intertrack, offtrack, and even telephone betting. Many tracks see their future in converting facility use to slot machine and video machine gambling.
History of Horse Racing
Records of horse racing date back to 4000b.c. or earlier. At that time Babylonian soldiers used chariots not only in wartime battles but also in staged races. By 1500 b.c., Assyrians incorporated chariot races into their recreational lives. The early breeds of horses that were available to the peoples of known Western “historical” societies were small in size. It would take two or more to pull a chariot, and individual horses could not be mounted by riders. A statue in a New York museum shows an Egyptian racing a mounted horse, however. The statue dates to 2000 b.c. In 624 b.c. there was a mounted horse race during the 33d Olympic games in Greece. Records suggest that the Greeks captured stronger horses from Arabs and Persians.
There was very likely betting on the Greek races, as gambling was part of their society. There is little question that the Romans bet on horse races. Races were held in Rome very soon after the city was founded. Racing events became an essential part of the entertainment of the masses of Roman citizens. Racing was also seen as a way of encouraging the development of a better, stronger, faster stock of horses for military uses. Romans are also credited with bringing their horses to the British Isles, where they raced against and also mixed with Celtic ponies. In about a.d. 200, the Romans held their first formal race meeting in England.
During the first millennium, racing captured the attention of all the civilizations throughout the Mediterranean world and farther east. The Arabian societies, which fell under the influence of Islam, adhered to prohibitions against gambling, but they made two exceptions. It was permissible to bet on scholarship contests involving children, as doing so encouraged learning the Koran, and it was permissible to bet on horse races, as doing so encouraged improvements in breeding that would result in better horses that could be used in holy battles with the infidel.
In England, horse racing and betting flourished. In the Middle Ages, horse-race betting took on its identity as the Sport of Kings. Henry II established weekly races at fairgrounds about 1174, and his son John kept a royal stable of racehorses. Serious breeding efforts and formal racetracks date back to the sixteenth century. Henry VIII passed laws that sought to isolate racing stallions from ordinary horses. He also demanded that each of his dukes and archbishops keep at least seven stallions. The oldest sponsored British race was probably the Chester Cup, which was run in 1512 during Henry’s reign. The first stakes race (a race requiring owners to pool money for the winner’s prize) was held during King James’s reign in the early seventeenth century. Under James’s direction, the racetrack at Newmarket initiated racing. During the Cromwell interlude a Puritan dominance of England precluded racing, but the activity came back with a vengeance with the Restoration and Charles II. He established new stakes royal races, and in 1674, the king himself mounted a steed and ran to a first-place finish at Newmarket.
Racing developed over the course of the seventeenth century in England as breeding practices were regularized, lineages were recorded, and tracks were improved. The notion of accurate lineage became even more critical with the arrival of three special horses in England toward the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Every thoroughbred horse running in the world today is descended from these three horses: Byerley’s Turk, Darley Arabian, and Godolphin Arabian.
In the seventeenth century, the purest breeds of horses were to be found in Turkey and Arabia. In 1688, British captain Byerley captured a horse from a Turkish officer at Buda. The horse that became known as Byerley’s Turk was probably born in 1680. He was brought to England, where his breeding career began. The second horse was called Darley Arabian. He was twenty years younger than Byerley Turk. He was bought by Englishman Thomas Darley at Aleppo in 1704 and sent to a farm in Yorkshire, where he performed stud duties until 1730. One of his sons was sent to North America. The third horse, Godolphin Arabian, was born in Yemen in 1724. He was first exported to Syria and then to Tunis, where he was given to the king of France. Englishman Edward Coke of Derbyshire purchased the horse in Paris and later sold him to the second earl of Godolphin for stud at his estate near Newmarket.
The first horses to arrive in the Western Hemisphere came west with the second voyage of Columbus in 1495. Columbus used horses in his conquest over indigenous populations in the Caribbean region. Thereafter, every ship from Spain carried horses. Their numbers multiplied in the Caribbean islands, and Cortez took horses from Cuba to Mexico in 1519 and used them as he overwhelmed his Aztec Native adversaries. Horses soon were being exported to the far reaches of South America. Many were also captured by Native Americans, and some ran off to start a wild horse population that was found on the American plains and into the Southwest. On some occasions the horses became a part of the food supply for desperate conquistadors and explorers. But the Spanish also raced the stock in Cuba and Mexico during the sixteenth century.
English settlers came to Virginia and New England in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The first horses arrived at Jamestown Colony in 1610, but the six mares and one stallion were eaten as other food supplies dwindled during the next winter. Subsequent ships brought more horses, including twenty mares in 1620, and a solid permanent stock of horses was established. The Virginia colonists also purchased horses, which had descended from Spanish imports, from Native peoples. As soon as horses were in the American colonies, horse racing began. The Virginia colony passed a law allowing racing in 1630. The previous year horses arrived in New England. By mid-century, racing was common all along the eastern seaboard, as the stock of horses was pervasive.
Cleared land was at a premium in these early colonial years, so most of the racing was on village streets or on narrow paths through woods. The notion of the sprint race developed, a precursor of quarter horse racing, which was popularized in the American West. Originally the betting on races was conducted among the owners of the horses. Disputes over betting and the results of the races were submitted to the law courts for resolution. The first race track in the Americas was established by Richard Nicholls, the British governor of New York, immediately after his countrymen had taken hostile possession of New York (New Amsterdam) from Dutch settlers in 1665. Nicholls built a large, oval, wide-open, grass track in present-day Jamaica, Long Island.
Other colonies followed by building their own tracks. The tracks allowed for much longer races. Indeed, the four-mile race became common. Racing was formalized, and large purses were offered to winners. At first, all betting had been among players, but with tracks, entrepreneurs developed systems of pooled betting. A pool seller would offer a wager at set odds, and then he would seek to sell chances on all the horses. If he could not sell all the horses and all the bets in the pool, he would be subject to taking losses on the races. The popularity of the tracks led more and more people to betting, including members of the less wealthy classes. As a result, several colonies passed laws banning racing.
Nevertheless, betting continued through the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Then the stock of racing horses became critical to the war effort, and racing stopped. Prior to the war, several colonies had developed jockey clubs that would establish the rules for all the races and to a degree would replace the civil law courts as the arbiters of disputes regarding wagers and race results.
The development of the breed and racing stock in Canada has been related to events in other countries as well as indigenous factors. The French began settlements in Quebec City in 1608. As the weather was quite severe there and also in other French Canadian settlements, horses were viewed as work animals. They ate and they worked, performing tasks on the farm and also in transportation. The population did not see them as frivolous objects that could be raced for fun. The motherland in Europe—France—did not send horses to Quebec for racing purposes. In France racing was an activity of royalty. During the French Revolution the rebels who brought down the royalty purposely killed all the racehorses in France, as they were a symbol of autocracy. There the activity of racing was lost for generations and also lost as an activity that could be exported to cousins in North America. By the time of the American Revolution, Quebec was part of a British colonial system. Some French farmers experimented in developing trotters; however, most of these horses were sold to be run in the United States. Nonetheless, a horse track opened in Montreal in 1828. Most of the thoroughbreds running in Montreal were initially from the United States. In 1836, however, King William IV of England commissioned a flat race (alternatively called the King’s Plate and Queen’s Plate) for Canadian-bred horses. Montreal remained the center of Canadian racing for a quarter-century.
Ontario (Upper Canada) developed steeplechases, as an elite aristocratic population familiar with fox hunting had migrated northward during the American Revolution. With increased populations, Ontario turned its sights to thoroughbreds. In 1860 the Toronto Jockey Club was able to persuade racing officials and horse owners to move the Queen’s Plate race to the Woodbine Track, where the race is still run. The Civil War in the United States years saw many horses from the South being moved into Ontario. More Canadian tracks developed. Canadian racing also received a boost when moral authority in the United States caused much racing to be declared illegal in all but a few states in the first decade of the twentieth century. This boost, which had resulted in many small Canadian tracks’ being opened, also brought in many corrupting elements. An epidemic of rigged races and other untoward practices resulted in Canada’s banning racetrack betting in the 1920s. In the 1930s racing was revived with a pari-mutuel system of betting in place.
In the United States, racing had a revival after the Revolutionary War, with most of the action being found in the South. Kentucky established itself as the premier location for horse breeding. Newly settled Western areas attracted racing interests. The era brought an end to long endurance races, as one-mile dashes and quarter-mile runs became popular. Quasi-official “stud books” were initiated to record the identities of all racing horses.
The Civil War devastated racing in the South. Only in the border state of Kentucky did racing continue without interruption. In the meantime, New York reestablished its earlier predominance in the sport. The Saratoga track opened in 1863 and became the country’s leading facility. Major stakes races were started, the first being the Travers Stakes run at Saratoga in 1864. Three new stakes races took on the aura of America’s Triple Crown. These were the Belmont Stakes, first run in New York City in 1867; the Preakness, first run at Baltimore’s Pimlico Track in 1873; and the Kentucky Derby, which had its initial run at Louisville’s Churchill Downs in 1875.
In 1894 the Jockey Club of New York was formed by the leading horse owners. The club set down rules for all thoroughbred racing, and the next year the state legislature decreed that the rules would be enforced on all tracks. Other states’ lawmakers also accepted the New York Jockey Club’s rules for their own tracks. The Jockey Club also took over the American Stud Book and thereby made it the universal book of registry for all thoroughbreds in the country. The rules and organization of regulation helped racetrack betting survive in New York at the turn of the century, whereas it was being rendered illegal in most other states. In Kentucky racing survived with state intervention in the form of the creation of the first state racing commission in the United States in 1906.
A wave of reform at the turn of the twentieth century that led to the demise of lotteries and the closing of casinos in New Mexico Territory and Arizona Territory and the state of Nevada also brought most racing to a standstill. Kentucky and Maryland survived as the only states allowing horse race betting through the reform era; policy in New York vacillated between tolerance and prohibition. Racing began its comeback in the 1920s and 1930s as states looked toward the gambling activity as a source for taxation revenues. The charge for a return to racing was helped with the introduction of the pari-mutuel system, as it centralized all betting, facilitating both control and also the extraction of taxation. Florida opened the Hialeah racetrack in 1925. A course opened in 1929 at Agua Caliente, Baja California, near Tijuana, serving the desires of California bettors before that state joined nine other states in legalizing pari-mutuel betting in 1933.
Other innovations also strengthened the growth of the sport. Power starting gates ensured that all horses were given an even beginning. Saliva tests were developed that could ensure that horses were not drugged. They were first used at Saratoga in 1932. In 1936 the photo finish was first used. The popularity of racing was also facilitated by illegal betting, which was encouraged by national bookie organizations that used wire services to instantaneously send information across the country to local street bookies and bookie shops.
During World War II racing remained a sport demanding public attention. Two horses, Count Fleet and Citation, won the Triple Crown in 1943 and 1948, respectively. Their presence made racing activity common conversation throughout the land. Horse racing peaked in the 1950s and 1960s with performances of star thoroughbreds such as Nashau, Swaps, and Native Dancer.
In 1966 Walter D. Osborne wrote, “The United States today is in the midst of the greatest boom in horseflesh since the invention of the gasoline engine”. What goes up sometimes comes down, however, and since the end of the 1960s, horse racing has been in a steady decline. Attendance at races has plunged drastically, and betting at on-track pari-mutuel windows has suffered accordingly. In the last three decades betting on racing at the tracks has gone from being the most popular form of gambling, with almost a legal monopoly of gambling activities in the United States, to being a very small sector of legal gambling – producing revenues under 8 percent of all legal gambling revenues. Only two factors have saved the betting sport from almost certain oblivion: (1) the introduction of revenues gained from off-track wagering and telephone betting and (2) the introduction of revenues from other gambling activity taking place on tracks and in card rooms (Hollywood Park, California), gambling machines (six states and four provinces), and sports betting (Tijuana).
There have been many suggestions for why racing has declined. Many have suggested that racing lost its edge by clinging to old “proven” methods that worked in an atmosphere of no competition. Racing rejected opportunities to put its entertainment products on television as that media swept American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Other professional sport events rushed to television. The public gave endorsements to baseball, football, and basketball as never before.
The baby boom generation that began to reach the age of majority in the 1960s did not relate to horses as did their fathers, or grandfathers. They were more focused upon automobiles as their form of transportation. More important, this emerging and now middle-aged generation was action oriented. Its members wanted their entertainment now, and they wanted entertainment to be constant. They did not see the excitement in watching horses run at a twenty-five-mile-per-hour clip for two minutes and then having to sit for thirty minutes before the action began again. They might ask why a sports fan would prefer horse racing to an auto race where cars spin around a track at 200 miles per hour for several hours.
The entertainment consumer of the latter part of the twentieth century did not want to have to devote time and energy to understanding what he or she was watching. It was not easy to understand the fine points of horse racing – that is, understanding enough for becoming a reasonably astute bettor-handicapper. When other forms of gambling—lottery, most casino games—became available to these consumers, their desire for racing products naturally declined.
Gaming competition is generally considered to be the major factor in the decline of racing. Additional factors surrounding the decline include the declining and aging condition of racing facilities – stands, betting areas, rest rooms. The tax “reform” legislation in the mid-1980s also took investment incentives away from businesspeople interested in racing.
The decline also fed upon itself, as prizes for horse race winners were taken from a betting pool. As bets were reduced in size, so too was money available for prizes. Lower prize money discouraged investors and also kept many from entering their horses into races. The quality of racing was affected as lesser-quality entries were led to the post gates. In turn, public interest in racing lessened again. The state (and provincial) governments made the situations worse as they often responded to lower betting activity by increasing their tax take from the betting pool. This not only affected prizes but also made the return for bettors less desirable, hence reducing the incentive for betting.
Although tracks realize these factors, they find that reforms are at best stopgap measures only allowing them to barely survive. They must run faster and faster just to stay in place.