The History of Horse Racing: From Its Origin to America, with a Timeline

When did horse racing start? Nobody can date the first race, because people were almost certainly racing each other on horseback long before anyone wrote it down. The first dated record is Greek: chariot races at the Olympic Games in 680 BC, and mounted races at the 33rd Games in 648 BC. After that the history of horse racing is a story of rules, breeding and money.

A timeline of racing’s milestones

This timeline skips far more than it includes, and the dates are the ones that most sources agree on.

• 680 BC: chariot racing at the Olympic Games.
• 648 BC: mounted racing at the 33rd Olympic Games.
• 1174: FitzStephen describes horse races at Smithfield, London.
• 1660s: Charles II makes Newmarket the center of English racing.
• 1665: a course is laid out on Long Island, the first organized racing in the colonies.
• c. 1750: the Jockey Club forms at Newmarket.
• 1780: the first Derby is run at Epsom.
• 1875: the first Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs.
• 1934: Santa Anita Park opens.
• 1937: Del Mar opens.

The timeline stops in 1937 because later history belongs to the individual tracks, and the sections below take each stage in turn.

Who invented horse racing, and where?

Nobody invented horse racing the way someone invented the telephone. Riders have raced each other for as long as there have been ridden horses, so the question of when horse racing was invented has no single answer, and where it was invented is just as uncertain, with the Central Asian steppe the likeliest cradle. The first horse race on record is Greek: the mounted race at the 33rd Olympic Games in 648 BC, after chariot races in 680 BC. What later centuries did invent was the organized sport, with written rules, a breed built for speed and a calendar of races.

The origin of racing: Greece, Rome and the steppe

The origin of the sport lies with riders on the Central Asian steppe, where horses were first domesticated and raced as a matter of course. The Greeks gave it a stage. Chariot races came first at Olympia, then mounted races, and both were prestige events that appeared on victory poems and vase paintings.

Rome built on that. The Circus Maximus held a crowd that ancient writers put at 150,000 to 250,000 (modern estimates vary widely), and chariot teams ran in factions identified by color. In Constantinople, the Blues and Greens grew into political parties with their own riots.

England follows, slowly. William FitzStephen described horse races outside the walls of London at Smithfield in the twelfth century, and Eastern horses came back from the Crusades. Racing remained a private matter between nobles until the Stuart kings gave it a home.

Newmarket, the Jockey Club and the Thoroughbred

So when did horse racing start as a sport with written rules? In seventeenth-century England. James I spent time at Newmarket in Suffolk because the heath was good for hunting and racing, and Charles II made it a fixture after 1660, riding in races himself. Newmarket became the center of English racing and it still is.

The Jockey Club, which formed around 1750, wrote rules to keep races fair, and over the following century it became the governing body for British racing. The Epsom Oaks followed in 1779 and the Derby in 1780, and the five English classics took shape.

Breeding turned racing into a science, and the origin of the modern Thoroughbred is far more recent than the sport itself. The Thoroughbred, a breed that is still used for racing today, descends from English mares crossed with imported Eastern stallions. Three of them, the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian, are the founders of the male lines. Almost every modern Thoroughbred traces to one of them, and most trace to Eclipse, the unbeaten stallion foaled in 1764.

How the English classics set the template

The five English classics gave racing its calendar. The St Leger at Doncaster, first run in 1776, is the oldest, and the Oaks and the Derby followed at Epsom in 1779 and 1780. The 2000 Guineas and the 1000 Guineas joined at Newmarket in 1809 and 1814. Each is restricted to three-year-olds, which is the reason the American Triple Crown copies the idea, and why a young horse’s spring and summer matter so much. The classic distances, from a mile to a mile and three-quarters, also shaped the breed: owners bred for horses that could be both fast and sound at three.

The history of horse racing in America

The history of horse racing in America begins in 1665, when the governor of New York, Richard Nicolls, laid out a course on Long Island’s Hempstead Plains and named it Newmarket. In the colonies of Virginia and the Carolinas, short match races between neighbors produced a stocky sprinter that became the American Quarter Horse.

Bulle Rock, a grandson of the Darley Arabian, was imported to Virginia in 1730, and he is generally seen as the first major Thoroughbred sire in America. Racing grew steadily after that, interrupted by the Civil War and revived afterward.

Saratoga opened in 1863, the Belmont Stakes was first run in 1867 and the Preakness in 1873. The Kentucky Derby followed in 1875 at Churchill Downs in Louisville. Only later did anyone bundle the three races together. Sir Barton won all of them in 1919, and the name Triple Crown spread in 1930, when Gallant Fox did the same.

California: Santa Anita, Del Mar and the rest

California’s chapter in the history of horse racing in America is short but vivid. Racing reached the state early, and the climate made it a year-round sport. Santa Anita Park opened in Arcadia on Christmas Day in 1934, with the San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop, and its Art Deco grandstand became one of the best known in the country. Del Mar opened on July 3, 1937, near San Diego, with Bing Crosby among its founders and a seaside setting that gave it the nickname “where the turf meets the surf.”

Seabiscuit made California racing famous. The small, unfashionable horse lost the Santa Anita Handicap by a nose in 1938 and won it in 1940, and crowds across the country followed his progress through the Depression. A book and a film retold the story decades later, and racing in popular culture has its own page.

Not every track survived, and that belongs in any honest history of horse racing. Bay Meadows closed in 2008, Hollywood Park in 2013 and Golden Gate Fields in 2023, each on land worth more than the racing. Quarter Horse racing continues at Los Alamitos, which opened in 1947, and the same breed fills many of the gymkhana and trail horses seen across the state.

Other kinds of racing: Quarter Horse, harness and jump racing

Thoroughbred flat racing is one branch of a larger tradition, and California has examples of several.

Quarter Horse racing is a sprint. Races run a quarter mile or less, and the breed takes its name from the short match races of colonial Virginia. The horses are built for explosive speed over those few seconds, which is why the field is decided so early.

Harness racing uses the Standardbred, a breed named for the early requirement that a registered horse trot or pace a mile within a set standard time. Trotters move diagonal legs together and pacers move the legs on one side together, and in both cases the horse pulls a light two-wheeled cart, called a sulky, with the driver seated behind.

Jump racing sends horses over fences or hurdles. It is most popular in Britain and Ireland, where the Grand National at Aintree, first run in 1839, is the best-known steeplechase, and it also appears in the American calendar. National Velvet, covered on the page about racing in popular culture, is built around that race.

Where to go next

The animals behind all of it need daily care, which the horse care guide covers. Readers curious about how modern races are read can move on to how to pick a winning horse, which explains the form guide.