June 10
OFF TO THE RACES DAY
The sport of harness racing was first covered in a newspaper in the U.S. in the June 10, 1806 edition of New York’s Commercial Advertiser. A pacer named Yankee won the mile at Harlem Race Track in New York. Yankee had the pace down correctly: simultaneously thrusting out the fore and hind legs on one side. We don’t know how many more races Yankee won, but the all-time high for pacer victories goes to Single G, a horse that won 262 races from 1918 through 1926. And Yankee wasn’t around to run in the Triple Crown of Pacers (which began in 1959): the Cane Pace (Yonkers Raceway, NY), the Little Brown Jug (Delaware County Fair, Delaware, OH) and the Messenger Stakes held at various locations. For most, however, harness racing is synonymous with trotting races. The difference between pacers and trotters is in their gait. Trotters use the diagonally opposite legs. The all-time high for trotter victories goes to Goldsmith Maid, who won 350 races from 1864 through 1877. The triple crown for trotters includes the most famous and richest race in North American harness racing, the Hambletonian. The Kentucky Futurity and Yonkers Trot complete the trio.
Trotting races go back in history to 1554 when they were first held in Valkenburg, the Netherlands. There are also traces of trotters in England in the 1590s. In the U.S., 1870 marks the date that the National Trotting Association was founded. It was first titled: National Association for the Promotion of the Interests of the Trotting Turf.
Great drivers, like Stanley Dancer (he won the Triple Crown of trotting twice, and of pacers once), have made harness racing a major spectator sport, complete with pari-mutuel wagering in many states. See the horses line up across the track. They start behind a moving gate that takes a full lap to get the horses up to speed. The electric gate then folds away and the horses pulling sulkies (the 2-wheeled wagon the jockey sits in) and jockey are, literally, off to the races! There they goooo!
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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