The Kentucky Derby is 3 days away and the horses are into their final workouts. Let’s compare how current favourites Orb, Revolutionary, Verrazano and Goldencents did this week compared with their competition. The timed workouts ranged from 4 to 6 furlongs. 1 furlong = 200m or 1/8 of a mile. 1. How far is 4…
Australia’s favourite racing mare, Black Caviar, retired in 2013 just four days after winning her 25th straight race. Here are some interesting facts and numbers about Black Caviar: She was born on August 18, 2006, and was bottle fed as a foal. 1. At what age is Black Caviar being retired? She stands 165 centimetres.…
Jockey Julie Krone was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2013. With 3,704 career wins, Krone is the leading female Thoroughbred horse racing jockey of all time. 1. Krone had 21,412 starts in her career. What percentage of those starts were wins? Of her total starts, 3,261 were seconds and 2,913 were…
Three hundred and sixty-nine horses were confirmed for the 2013 Triple Crown series prior to the Jan. 26 deadline for early nominations. Each horse cost $600 to nominate. 1. How much money was paid altogether by the owners of these early nominees? This year’s total of early nominees is down from the 398 horses made…
Jockey Rosie Napravnik closed out a career-best season in 2012, securing the highest spot ever for a female jockey on the North American leader board. Finishing the year with $12,451,713 in purse earnings and 193 wins with 191 seconds and 167 thirds from 1,200 starts, Napravnik finished eighth among the top jockeys in the nation…
Chapter Seven, a 4-year-old male trotter won eight of 10 starts in 2012 and equaled the world record of 1:50.1 on a mile racetrack and was named harness-racing’s 2012 Horse of the Year. A winning percentage is the fraction of races won. To calculate the winning percentage divide the number of wins by the total…
Calidoscopio, a 9-year-old Argentinean gelding, won the 1 ¾-mile 2012 Breeders’ Cup Marathon becoming the oldest horse ever to win a Breeders’ Cup race. There are several different ways to compare a horse’s age with a human’s age. Here is one way: Beginning at birth, horses age 6.5 years for each human year until they…
Alabar Bloodstock, a Standardbred breeding farm, is celebrating the birth of what many believe may be the first white standardbred foal ever born in Australia. The one-in-a-million colt is being treated like a Hollywood star at the Goulburn Valley farm where he was foaled. “He’s not an albino and he’s not a grey, because grey’s…
Frankel, hailed as the greatest horse of them all, has been retired after his 14th and final victory. For three hundred years breeders have plotted to create the perfect equine running machine. “I can’t believe that in the history of racing there has ever been a better racehorse,” said Frankel’s trainer, Sir Henry Cecil, after…
Clansmen and monks in the Upper Dolpa area of Nepal first gathered eight centuries ago to pray, feast, fight over property and compete for the title of fastest horseman in the Himalayas. 1. How many years are in eight centuries? They have met every 12 years since in the Tibetan Year of the Dragon for…