Horse races are a popular sport in many countries across the world. People place bets on which horses will win or finish in the top three and even accumulator bets where several outcomes are included. Some bettors attend horse races and place their bets at the track, while others take advantage of online betting platforms where they can wager from the comfort of their homes.
In the early 1800s, thoroughbred racing became a sensation in the United States. As the sport grew, it created a series of elite events called stakes, which offered large purses and often pitted champions from different regions against each other. The first Triple Crown race, consisting of the Belmont Stakes, Preakness Stakes, and Kentucky Derby, was run in 1873.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, new rules were adopted to make horse races more fair. The industry developed a system of classifying races by age, sex, and birthplace to create a set of rules that would ensure equality among competing horses. This helped attract more spectators and generate bigger profits for the owners.
The number of horse deaths at racetracks has declined since the heyday of the sport in the 1800s, but the sport still has a reputation for being dangerous for animals. Many horses-particularly those that are pushed beyond their limits-will bleed from the lungs, a condition known as exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage. This can be caused by a variety of factors, including the pounding of horses with whips, poor nutrition, and medications.
There are essentially three types of people in the horse racing industry: the crooks who dangerously drug their horses and dare regulators to catch them; the dupes who labor under the fantasy that the sport is broadly fair and honest; and those masses in the middle, neither naive nor cheaters but honorable souls who know the business is more crooked than it should be but do not do all they can to fix it.
Behind the romanticized facade of Thoroughbred horse racing is a world of injuries, drug abuse, and gruesome breakdowns. Horses are forced to sprint-often under the threat of whips and illegal electric shock devices-at speeds so high they sometimes bleed from their lungs. The resulting equine trauma can be masked by cocktails of legal and illegal drugs that mask the animals’ pain, increase their speed, and boost their performance. A spate of deaths in 2019 at Santa Anita Park spurred a series of reforms, but the underlying problems remain.
