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Informative Essay On Harness Racing

Decent Essays

Live Harness Racing Season

Horses are extremely beautiful creatures. They are strong, powerful and majestic. It can be really exciting to watch them when they’re racing. Here at Isle Casino Racing Pompano Park, we love a good horse race. But what’s even more thrilling than a regular horse race is harness racing! In fact, October 4 marks the official start of live harness racing season. If you’ve never heard of it, then today is your lucky day. Read on to learn more about this interesting sport.

What is Harness Racing?

Harness racing is where a driver races a Standardbred horse by puling a two-wheeled vehicle, referred to as a sulky. There are essentially two types of harness racing horses, which are differentiated by how they walk. The pacer is a horse that moves both legs at one side of its body at the same time. The trotter steps with its left front and right rear leg moving simultaneously.

What is The Origin?

Records of harness racing stem back to ancient times of 1500 BC, where Assyrian kings used to draw chariots for the purpose of war and hunting. Olympic …show more content…

By the 17th century, the United States really began to focus on breeding specialized harness racing horses. One of the first harness racing tracks in America was the Harlem Lane course, located in New York. As the popularity of the sport increased, other tracks were built, including the Roosevelt Raceway in 1940. Pretty much every Standardbred in the United States can trace its roots back to Hambletonian. Hambletonian was the son of the great sire, Messenger, who was brought to the U.S. in 1788. Pacers, on the other hand, had a much different path than that of the trotter. Their roots stem from the Narragansett pacer and the Canuck of French Canada. The trotter may have started in the east, but the pacer grew massive interest in the Midwest and South. Strangely, before the pacer became popular in the 19th century, it was actually the despised

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