Interesting Facts About the Exciting World of Thoroughbred Racing

A thoroughbred race horse will generally tip the scales at somewhere between 1000 and 1200 pounds.  Compared to the rest of their body, the legs of a horse are spindly things, twigs with not much meat on them.  Yet those legs support their immense musculature and, when their knees are locked, allow a horse to do something we as humans would surely LOVE to be able to do:  sleep standing up.  That’s right, because a horse has legs that can lock up completely at the knee, eliminating the need for any muscles to hold it upright, the horse can sleep soundly, comfortably for hours on end while standing totally upright.

An average human male stands around five feet, nine inches tall and weighs between 170 and 185 pounds, while that same man’s brain weighs in at between 50-56 ounces, or 3 and a half pounds.  Humans are the most intelligent animals on earth, and that explains the high brain-to-body-weight ratio; humans need the big brain because of things like walking upright, hand dexterity, eyesight (which humans are more dependent on than any other animal), and complex cognitive thought.  Thoroughbreds, on the other hand are, while very intelligent, are not very much in need of the aforementioned complex cognitive thought.  Their world is dominated mostly by one word: running.  Horses are expressive animals, social animals, and in the wild they like to express themselves through running.  Because horses don’t have any need for a brain as big as a human being, it may come as a surprise to you that the brain of an eleven-hundred pound horse weighs only 22-25 ounces, which is less than half of what a human’s weighs, and yet thoroughbreds weigh nearly SEVEN TIMES as much as a man.  

In ancient Greece, the Olympics were a big, big deal.  Men competed in events to test their athletic prowess and skill.  Some events that we see in the modern Olympic Games today were held many thousands of years ago in the original Olympic Games.  There was wrestling, though it was done naked, and there were sometimes men who were seriously injured, even killed, during a wrestling match.  The sprinting events, like the 100 yard dash, was in existence back then, but do you care to venture a guess about which was the very first Olympic sport back in ancient Greece?  Well, if you were smart, you picked something to do with horses.  That’s right, Chariot racing was the very first Olympic Sporting Event way back in about 700 B.C.  Immortalized in the Oscar winning film from the 1950s Ben Hur starring Charlton Heston and depicting a Roman Chariot Race, the Romans got the idea from the Greeks.  Chariot racing was extremely violent and dangerous, and by the time the Olympics were resumed in 1896, they had long since been branded too risky for the humans and horses involved, and that’s why we don’t see Chariot Racing in the modern Olympics.