Thoroughbred Racing vs. Harness Racing: What are the Major Differences?
Thoroughbred racing is by a wide margin one of the most mainstream kinds of horse racing. Notwithstanding Thoroughbred racing, there is also harness racing. Thoroughbred racing obviously just has registered Thoroughbreds in their races, and harness racing, at any rate in the United States, just has registered Standardbreds. Vitale is currently hosting POST TIME, airing on the CBS affiliate WBOC-TV in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. She has also served on espn2 broadcasting team for The American Championship Harness Racing Series. With decades of experience as a television journalist for harness racing, Heather Vitale has earned several accolades, including U.S. Harness Writers Association’s (USHWA) Dan Patch Awards 2014. Today, we joined her in conversation to know the difference between thoroughbred racing and harness racing.
“A central point that sets harness racing and Thoroughbred racing apart is the way that harness racing uses a sulky, otherwise called a race bike, which is a lightweight cart attached to the horse. The sulky has just two wheels and a seat wherein the driver sits to control their horse,” says Heather Vitale, Global Correspondent on Harness Racing.
Vitale explains that the other distinctive factor between these two sorts of racing is that Thoroughbreds just utilize one four-beat gait (the gallop) when racing, though harness races either permit trotting or pacing. Trotting is a two-beat diagonal gait where the legs move together in diagonal sets. The other permitted gait in the harness race is the pace, which is a two-beat lateral gait that happens when the two legs push ahead together.
“During harness races, if the horse breaks their stride and quickens into a trot or gallop, they must be eased back down into their right gait, or they will be excluded. At the point when a horse “breaks” their gait, this essentially implies that their pattern of footfall has changed. For instance, the trot is a two-beat diagonal gait, and if the horse goes from that two-beat diagonal gait to a three beat gait, they have broken their gait. The “beat” of a gait essentially alludes to the footfall pattern, a two-beat gait has two feet hit together simultaneously, and a four-beat gait will have four feet hit the ground simultaneously. The pace is a quicker gait than the trot, and a greater part of the horses that compete in harness racing are pacers. With respect to the actual velocities that these horses accomplish during races, Thoroughbreds run at around forty to 45 miles for every hour, and Standardbreds run around thirty miles an hour,” explained Heather Vitale.
To the extent the race itself goes, harness races are run on one or the other dirt or clay surfaces, instead of Thoroughbred races that can be on dirt, turf, or engineered surfaces. Harness races are regularly one-mile-long and require their rivals to participate in a qualifier. A qualifier is just a one-mile race that the horse needs to finish in a set measure of time. In correlation, Thoroughbred races can be somewhere in the range of four and a half furlongs (simply over half a mile) to twelve furlongs (mile and a half) and keeping in mind that the horses don’t participate in qualifiers, they do need to be cleared by authorities that they can part from the starting entryway prior to beginning in a race. The utilization of the starting entryway is likewise totally different among these two sorts of races. Thoroughbred racing has their horses break from a standstill inside their starting gate, while harness races (in the U.S.) use a mechanized beginning entryway that the horses are running behind.
Heather Vitale further reveals that another region of contrast between these two types of racing is the way their horses regularly return to the race. “In harness racing, it is normal for their horses to be entered in races week after week, racing three to four times each month. That is far more uncommon in Thoroughbred racing, where the normal time between races is roughly three weeks. The purses for harness races are sometimes as much as three times less than that of Thoroughbred races, she says.
In spite of the fact that these two sorts of racing have their disparities, by the day’s end, they are exhibiting the athleticism of the horses that are contending in these races and the aptitudes of the racers/jockeys and coaches with which they are associated.
