With Australia’s marvelous race mare ‘Black Caviar’ flying out of Australia today  to the UK , I thought it might be nice to blog a short history on Horse Racing.

Short History on Horse Racing

Alfred De Dreux (French 1810 – 1860) “The Start of a Horse Race”

The competitive racing of horses is one of humankinds most ancient sports, having it’s origins amoung prehistoric nomadic tribesmen of Central Asia who first domesticated the horse in about 4500 BC. For thousands of years horse racing flourished as the sport of kings and the nobility.

By the time humans began to keep written records, horse racing was an organised 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 obcession in the Roman Empire.

Raoul Millais – The start of a horse race.

The origins of modern racing lie in the 12th century, when English knoights returned from the Crusades with swift Arab horses. Over the next 400 years, an increasing number of Arabian stallions were imported to breed to English mares. This cross produced 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 match racing gave way to races involving several horses on which spectators wagered. Racecourses sprang up all over England , offering increasingly large purses to attract the best horses. These purses in turn made owning and breeding horses for racing profitable. With the rapid expansion of the sport came the need for central governing authority. In 1750 racing’s elite met at Newmarket to form the Jockey Club, which to this day exercise’s complete control over English racing.

An early importation to Australia was the Arabian stallion (Old) Hector, whose bloodlines are to be found in the pedigrees of some Australian Thoroughbreds.

In Australia Thoroughbred horseracing is an important spectator sport in Australia, and gambling on horseraces is a popular pastime with A$14.3 billion wagered in 2009/10 with bookmakers and the Totalisator Agency Board (TAB). The two forms of Thoroughbred horseracing in Australia are flat racing, and races over fences or hurdles in Victoria and South Australia. Thoroughbred racing is the third most attended spectator sport in Australia, behind Australian rules football and rugby league, with almost two million admissions to 360 registered racecourses throughout Australia in 2009/10.  Horseracing commenced soon after European settlement, and is now well-appointed with automatic totalizators,starting gates and photo finish cameras on nearly all Australian racecourses.

On an international scale Australia has more racecourses than any other nation. It is second to the United States in the number of horses starting in races each year. Australia is third, after the U.S. and Japan for the amount of prize money that is distributed annually.

Read more at www.wikipedia.org