Graded stakes races

[DesertDog]

Okay, it’s been nearly two weeks since the Belmont so I’m over it now (mostly) and I can ask this question.

At the track with us we had another couple who didn’t know much about horseracing and were asking a zillion questions. Between us, DesertRoomie and I were able to field them all, but one: At the top of the heirarchy of horse races stand the graded stakes races (G3, G2, and G1). Who (or what) decides whether a race is graded and the grade it is in?

It’s not strictly the size of the purse. I have seen some G2 races with bigger purses than G1s. I’ve poked around the DRF site and not found the answer. Anybody out there know?

DD

[DesertDog]

Bump.

Somebody’s got to know, right?

::crickets::

[Spoons]

Well, I’ll give it a try.

The answer is not a simple one, and is wrapped up in a little bit of history. The following comes from the Thoroughbred Times Racing Almanac 2003:

At the urging of European racing officials who, in 1972, had created the pattern race system to identify and grade the best-quality races in Europe, the Thoroughbred Breeders and Owners Association [TOBA] created the North American Graded Stakes Committee and undertook to create a similar grading system for the 1973 racing season. The gradings were principally designed to assist buyers of bloodstock by identifying the North AMerican races that in the recent past had consistently attracted the highest levels of competition. Grade 1 would be the highest level, followed by Grade 2 and Grade 3, the latter being the lowest level of stakes races accorded a grade.

The first North American gradings, totaling 330 races, were announced in January 1974, and the English Jockey Club immediately accepted them. Fasig-Tipton Co. began to publish the gradings in its catalogs in 1975, and Keeneland Association followed in '76. In 1998, Canadian racing authorities began to grade that nation’s races [not quite true, see below] and the name of the TOBA-led organization was changed to the American Graded Stakes Committee…

Grades of all America’s best races are reviewed annually by the American Graded Stakes Committee because stakes programs are dynamic and ever-changing products of conditions, and the quality of any race’s contestants may differ markedly from one year to the next. When a trend in the quality of the field of a race is established, be it improving or deteriorating quality, the race is re-evaluated for grading. Members have said that they take a five-year view of each race when considering the gradings.

The above is taken from the Thoroughbred Times Racing Almanac 2003 (Lexington, KY: Thoroughbred Times Company Inc., 2003), page 212.

That should answer your question fairly well, but I’ll add a few words about the Canadian graded stakes program, as alluded to in the above quote.

I don’t believe that 1998 was the year Canadian races began to be graded–I myself remember that we had graded stakes in Canada for about as long as I have been following Canadian racing, and that has been many years. Somewhere in my files, for example, I still have such things as Queen’s Plate and Rothman’s International programs from the late 1980s and early 1990s showing the grades of these races as “G1-C.” The “C,” of course, stands for “Canadian.”

But if I recall correctly, it would have been about 1998 that the “C” was dropped, and the races were designated as simply “G1” or whatever grade they were, just as in the United States. Makes sense; horses (especially stakes-quality ones) are frequently shipped back and forth across the border to participate in major stakes, and all the “C” did was to denote geography.

Anyway, I hope this answers your question, and that my little tangent was helpful also.