TheStreet: Stock Quotes, Financial Market News, & Investment Advice

The Good Side of Horse Racing

In horse racing, it is not surprising that stamina in race horses is found more often abroad than in the U.S.

Even in England, where there is a tendency to speed, the classics range up to their Derby at a mile and a half and a mile and three-quarters - at St. Leger.

And France really goes for staying power in a horse. In April and May, there are four classics for Frenchbreds at up to one mile and five-sixteenths.

Followed by the big four classics that are the pleasure of Paris in the spring, ranging from a mile and five-sixteenths race up to the Grand Prix de Paris, late in June, at a mile and seven-eighths.

A 1956 study of selected race meetings in the U.S., England, and France in The Blood Horse, a Kentucky journal of distinction, edited by racing's brilliant and severest critic, J.A. Estes, showed that only five percent of U.S. races were at more than one mile and a quarter.

In other words, most French racing starts where ours stops. French breeders at the racetrack prove out horses with stamina and breed their best mares to the colts that win these long-distance tests.

This is the classical standard, based on the 'improvement of the breed' that serious racing men have always insisted is the real object of horse racing.

It is widely agreed by race horse owners and racetrack operators that distance racing is more interesting than sprints, that the drama in racing is seeing whether horses can go on and to longer distances, and that this is the public preference.

However, there are some large difficulties in the way of giving the public what it wants.

One difficulty is in the realm of biology: it is a fact that the thoroughbred breed has a tendency to retrogress, especially in the quality of staying power, which is much harder to breed than sheer sprinting speed.

This tends to create a shortage of distance horses, and the shortage is reflected in the design of most U.S. races.

In the course of racing, horses grade themselves into the conventional pyramid shape, with a small number of good ones at the top and a large number of poor ones at th bottom. The races are also graded, of course, so as to bring horses of a similar class together and to make for equal contests.

The top races are the classics, the weight-for-age races, and the great handicaps in which the best horses are held down by extra weight in order to produce an even contest.

Below these kinds of superior races are the so-called 'allowance races', which are designed to bring out good horses under various conditions, and the races for 'maidens' (those that have never won a race).

Finally, at the base of the pyramid, there are the claiming races, in which all the horses entered are, in effect, put up for sale at a stipulated price level; any such horse may be bought before the race and possession taken of it after it runs.

The point is, to bring together horses of similar quality - or lack of quality.