Horse racing then vs. now

If a fan of Thoroughbred racing today traveled back a century to see what the sport was like at the time of Sir Barton’s initial Triple Crown sweep in 1919, they’d find the fundamentals not much different.

But the racing landscape, like life in general, had a vastly different look.

Racetracks

Although part of the great triumvirate of popular early 20th century sports, along with baseball and boxing, racing was quite concentrated at the time of Sir Barton. The sport earned a nefarious reputation in the 1890s and early 1900s, when tracks (and gambling) sprung up across the country like weeds. The ensuing moral backlash shuttered racing for a generation or more in many places and permanently in others.

Racing in Sir Barton’s day was centered in three states — New York, Maryland, and Kentucky — with a wintertime outlet in Louisiana, as well. The Triple Crown host sites of Churchill Downs, Pimlico, and Belmont Park were around, of course, as were familiar tracks like Saratoga, Fair Grounds, and Laurel.

However, many tracks in existence at the time consolidated with others or didn’t survive through the Great Depression a decade later. Notable among these were Jamaica and Empire City in New York, Havre de Grace in Maryland, and the Kentucky Association track in Lexington and Latonia in Kentucky.

It wasn’t until the latter 1920s and 1930s — when circuits like Chicago, Miami, Southern California, and New England were either revived or came on board — that racing would see another expansion.

Wagering

The adoption of pari-mutuel wagering, where the odds are determined by the public, based on the amount bet on each horse, was one answer to the “evils” of bookmaking that instigated the backlash against racing.

Although pari-mutuel wagering was in place at tracks in Maryland and Kentucky, New York tracks clung to the on-track bookmaking system until 1940. Only win, place, and show wagering was offered, and the $2 minimum bet of the time was the rough equivalent of nearly $30 today.

But illegal wagering on racing was undoubtedly widespread throughout the country. Anyone who has ever watched the Oscar-winning film “The Sting” can get a sense of what the more sophisticated underground betting operations looked like.

Technology

Many of the inventions and technological advances we've grown to take for granted were, in Sir Barton’s day, still a decade or two away.

All three classics Sir Barton won began from either a tape or standing start, rather than a starting gate. The Belmont Stakes was still run European style, in a clockwise fashion, as were all races at Belmont Park.

While judges were stationed around the track, the patrol filming of each race, from various angles, was still some years away. In the days when any infractions had to be caught in real time, by a set of eyes, it was sometimes the Wild West out on the racetrack.

Also missing were the photo-finish cameras and electronic timing. All timing was done by hand. Public-address systems, with announcers providing a verbal description of the action to the fans in the stands, first came along, on a limited basis, in the late 1920s.

Training

In an era when fans are generally accustomed to seeing the best horses race with a gap of a month or more between starts, it’s hard to comprehend the frequency at which horses of yesteryear were campaigned.

The example of Sir Barton was hardly unusual for his time. With limited options to prep, Sir Barton made his season debut in the Kentucky Derby. It was his first race in eight months and was also his first beyond 6 furlongs.

Sir Barton was on the train to Baltimore soon after the Derby and, just four days later, won the Preakness. On four occasions later that year, Sir Barton raced on four days’ rest or less.

As a general proposition, horses were often “raced into shape,” steadily building up in shorter races to succeed in bigger events going longer. This type of conditioning remains prevalent in Australia but not so much in the U.S., where many horsemen have come to value a high win percentage, rather than losing races unnecessarily.

Media

The daily newspaper was the dominant medium in the days of Sir Barton. Unless they had access to a wire service or hung out at the track every day, virtually the only ways for fans to keep tabs on what was going on was through their local paper, trade dailies like the Morning Telegraph and Daily Racing Form, or specialty trade and sporting magazines.

Licensed radio stations began popping up in the years after Sir Barton, and by the time Gallant Fox swept the Triple Crown in 1930, the Kentucky Derby and other major races had become staples of Saturday network radio programming. The original “voice of racing” for the masses was Clem McCarthy, who called the Kentucky Derby for CBS into the early 1950s.

Local television broadcasts of the Kentucky Derby began in the late 1940s, with the first nationwide telecast in 1952. Racing’s relationship with television has been spotty and often misunderstood, but there’s no doubting fans of today have it made, able to listen or watch (and wager on) virtually any race in the world on personal electronic devices.

Racing’s general popularity has declined precipitously in the last 100 years and long ago lost its monopoly as the only legal form of wagering. But it’s still around in a form, as it was even a century before Sir Barton. For those of us who love it, that’s a good thing.