Getting Ready for the Race

Not all horse races require animals to carry extra weight, only handicaps and allowance races. In stake races, such as the Belmont or the Preakness, all horses carry the same amount of weight.

In handicaps, the better a horse is rated, the more weight he or she must carry. There is also an allowance for novice jockeys, whose amounts carry a bit less.

This extra leeway is known as the bug because it is noted in racing programs with an asterisk (bug) after the entry. Nobody is really sure how much difference another unit of weight makes to a given horse on a given day, but the theory of allowance and handicap races is that giving the superior horses more weight evens out the field, making for a closer, more exciting race.

Some horses and/or riders are so superior that the extra weight doesn't seem to faze them, but where talents are evenly matched you should figure that weight will make the most difference in long races or under conditions that don't favor that particular horse.

In a claiming race--- a holdover from the early days of American racing, when the real purpose of the whole affair was to sell the horse--- the horses are claimed for a certain price.

This means that the owner declares his or her animal, worth, say, $3,000. Then if it's a $3,000 claiming race, anyone can buy the horse at that price after the race. It pays a handicapper to keep track of which class a horse has most recently been entered in.

After all, if the owner drops his animal from the $5,000 class to the $3,000 class, there must be a good reason. Changes in the other direction may be even more significant. Remember, too, that a horse which has done poorly in a higher class may prove a better earner once played with horses of a lower class. A record that looks very bad at $5,000 may be stunning at $3,000.

In thoroughbred racing, allowances are usually made for younger horses against older ones and females against males. To make evaluations of this kind, a handicapper must look at the whole field of a race to try and determine just how much competition the rest of the field represents to each animal.

At the earlier stages, even a matter of months may make a big difference. In a two-year old race, it helps to know the actual birth date of the animals. Some two-year olds may be four or five months younger than the rest of the field, causing a potential deficit in strength and size that's hard to make up.