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Horse Racing History
The practice of horse racing competitively can be traced back to ancient times, but the most popular organized form of horse racing in the U.S., thoroughbred racing, can be traced back to the mid 1800's. The first major thoroughbred races held in the United States were in 1863 at the racetrack in Saratoga Springs, New York. Churchill Downs opened its racetrack track in 1875. After that other thoroughbred tracks soon began appearing across the country. In the beginning of U.S. thoroughbred horse racing there were many African American jockeys, but then whites forced them from the saddle and would effectively deny them riding opportunities until the end of the twentieth century. This happened at the same time when Latin Americans and women were starting to become top jockeys.
The Thoroughbred Racing Association was founded in 1942, and it is the leading regulatory organization in horse racing. However, individual state racing commissions oversee racing within their borders. In recent horse racing history, the three chief U.S. horse races include the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, the Preakness at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, and the Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park. Each are limited to three-year-old horses, and combined these events are known as the Triple Crown. Past winners of the Triple Crown, such as Citation,1948, and Secretariat, 1973, are few and far between and are considered the greatest achievers in horse racing history.
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 horse 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 horse 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 horse 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 horse racing and sanctioned racecourses to conduct meetings under those rules. Standards defining the quality of horse 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 horse 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 horse race were those descended from horse racing 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.
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 horse racing as a sport became a popular local pastime, the development of organized horse 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, horse racing betting, and therefore horse racing itself, grew explosively; by 1890, 314 tracks were operating across the country.
In 1894 the nation's most prominent horse racing track and stable owners met in New York to form an American Jockey Club, modeled on the English, which soon ruled horse racing with an iron hand and eliminated much of the corruption.
In the early 1900s, however, horse racing in the United States was almost wiped out by anti-horse racing betting 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 horse racing tracks opened as many state legislatures agreed to legalize pari-mutuel horse 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 horse racing sport focuses primarily on major Thoroughbred horse races such as the American Triple Crown and the Breeder's Cup horse 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 horse racing dates, while sharing the appointment of horse racing officials and the supervision of racing rules with the Jockey Club. The Jockey Club retains authority over the breeding of Thoroughbreds.
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