History of Horse Racing
History of Horse Racing
During ancient times, horse racing, an equistrian sport was very popular to all the people in Roman, Byzantine and ancient Greek. Even in myths and legends, horse racing has a part of it, like the story of horse racing competition between the Odin god and Hrungnir the giant in Norse mythology. One of the ancient racing sports called “Chariot Racing” and it was very dangerous that could cause severe injury or even death if they played it in the wrong way. But even though horse riders knew that it could take their lives, they were still devoted to go on on this kind of sport. Because in this field, their horsemanship excellence could be seen by people and it’s really important as they could use it in times of battle.
Even in their Olympic Games as well as the Panhellenic Games, Chariot racing should never be missed out as it provided entertainment to all of them.
Aside from Chariot Racing, there was another horse racing that was really popular to the aristocrats of British society. This horse racing called “Thoroughbred Racing”. The story behind this was occurred on 12th Century when the English knights came home to their land together with the Arab horses.
Arab stallions were bred to English mares then it resulted to produced Thoroughbred breed. After Thoroughbred breed was produced, they have seen it’s unique capability, they’ve seen that these breeds have extraordinary speed and endurance. During Queen Anne’s reign around 17th Century, placing bets in horse racing was started until Jockey Club was created to arranged and organized the racing sport. By 18th Century in Britain, horse racing became their first regulated sport with the kind help of Jockey Club organization.
Since numerous of horse racing was done from the past centuries, a lot of countries today made different kinds of horse racing as well. People that mastering about this field started to categorized the racing sport and it resulted to have these “3 Major Racing Types”: first is “Flat racing”, second is “Steeplechasing” (Racing Over Jumps) and third is “Harness Racing”. In Flat racing, only Thoroughbred, Quarter Horse, Appaloosa, Paint and Arabian breeds are included. While AQPS and Thoroughbred are included in Steeplechasing and Standardbred horses that came from countries of Australia, New Zealand and North America are can be used in Harness Racing. Breeds that can be seen in Europe like Russian Trotter and Finnhorse are also welcome to use in Harness Racing.
As we can see, horse racing became important and popular from old generation up to modern generation. Believe it or not, the record of people who involved in horse racing had a figure of 6 million since 2004. Compare to some few interested from 1970’s – 1980’s. How much more in our present day. It is so true that even though some were not really got lucky, a lot of people in reverse got entertained and changed their lives because of Horse Racing games.
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