I understand that there are male horses and female horses that race. But I notice that you sometimes have colts, geldings, fillies and mares. Plus you have pacers and trotters in harness racing. And I think I’m nissing some. What are the differences? Are some faster than others? If so, why wouldn’t we be left with only the fastest types? Is there a website where I can find a description of all of these?
Trotters and pacers are only different in the gate that they use. One moves the feet that are diagonally opposite, and one moves the feet that are on the same side of the body. I can’t recall which is which.
“Colt” refers to a horses age.
“Fillies” and “mares” are both female horses. “Gelding” is a male horse that has been castrated. You may race a gelding, but would probably not. The money in horse racing isn’t made at the track, it is made in the breeding stall. If you’ve got a winner, you want to be able to charge for either 1) the stallion coverning mares, or 2) the offspring the mare foals.
Briefly:
A colt is an ungelded male, less that four years old.
Geldings, obviously, are gelded, aka castrated. Poor fellas.
Fillies: Young females, like colts. 4 and under. My grandpa would bet solely on Fillies. That didn’t work out so well for him.
Mares are older than fillies but females.
Alright, a “trotter” as I understand it, simply means a horse that runs harness races. As for “pacers” I’ve never really heard this. I think this means simply the lead horse, most specifically the leader for the first half of the race or so.
Hope that helps. If you need more, I will harness my childhood of horse-race-ass-sitting for further definitions.
Thanks, are trotters and pacers trained to run a specific way, or is it natural? And based on times that I’ve seen, pacers are fasters than trotters. So, presumably they wouldn’t be allowed to run the same race.
Also, geldings do race. I think one of the recent triple crown hopefuls was a gelding. Now, why would one castrate a race horse? If the money is in breeding, why do it?
Gelding is used to, er, adjust the attitude of a particularly testosterone-y male. Males that are overly hormonal can be violent, uncontrollable, and hard to ride. So, no, they might not be able to have kids, but they’ll ride better. There’s certainly money to be made on the track as well. Funny Cide, if I recall, was a gelding, and he made a serious run at the Triple Crown.
Trotting is natural in that all horse can do it. Pacers are both bred and trained to go that specific way. (pacing is when both legs on each side move together, instead of diagonal pairs, **birdmonster[/b) ]Both Trotting and pacing racehorses are a breed called “Standardbred” – so called because in the foundation of the breed, the only way to enter the studbook was to trot a mile in a standard speed (I think it was 4 minutes). The foundation sire of the Standardbred breed – the horse whose lineage established the breed – was named Hambletonian, and he was bred in upstate New York.
The “normal” gaits – walk, trot-canter and gallop – are also called the “natural gaits” because all horses can perform them naturally. However there have been horses that have been bred to move in alternative manner – including Pacing Standardbreds (Standardbred is the breed of both pacing and trotting racers), Tennesee Walking Horses, Missouri Foxtrotters and others. These alternative gaits are known as the “Artificial gaits” (although horses bred for them can do them naturally) and horses that know how to perform them are called “gaited” breeds.
The reasons for developing these gaits are varied, but usually the “artificial gait” is smoother and less bumpy than the natural one, allowing someone to spend a very long day in the saddle more comfrotably – someone like a plantation owner or overseer. In the case of pacing, it is simply faster than trotting.
You are correct in your throught that trotters and pacers don’t compete against each other. They have separate events.
In the case of the recent gelding Thoroughbred – he had an undescended testicle in youth, a condition that can make galloping very painful. The vast majority of racehorses are intact.
Quarterhorses have not been mentioned. As the name implies they excel at short track sprints of quater mile. They are more compact and heavily muscled than throroughbreds which run somewhat longer distances. AFAIK they are not raced against each other.
Racing a quarter horse against a thoroughbred would be like racing a top fuel dragster against a NASCAR car.
It’s just not comparable.
Arabians are also raced on traditional tracks, as well as against all sorts of breeds in cross-country endurance races, where mules are increasingly shown to kick serious ass. Though asses don’t make much of a showing. 
Whoops, there was supposed to be a hyperlink in there…
Oh my gosh, geldings race all the time. According to this article, geldings accounted for 26% of all thoroughbred starts and 23% of purse winnings in 2002. Ordinary claiming races are full of geldings. They don’t run very often at the top levels, because there the money is in breeding and you don’t castrate a horse with top blood lines unless it’s absolutely necessary because of temperament or anatomy (as with Funny Cide). But for ordinary race horses, it’s very common.
Technically (and if I recall correctly), a horse with an undescended testicle is known as a ridgeling, and such a condition can indeed be painful to the horse when he gallops. So, if the horse seems likely to be able to race and win, even though his hormones are making him act up, an owner might decide to try running him as a gelding.
As has been said, there have been some fine geldings who have won big races, but generally, since there is no money to be made from breeding, the only way for an owner to make money off a gelding is to run him to win purses in whatever races present themselves. This approach can sometimes work–the gelding Kelso had a career spanning seven years (from 1959 to 1966) that earned his owner close to $2M–but as a stakes-winning gelding, Kelso seems to be one of the rare exceptions to the rule. Most geldings I’ve seen run do so in much-less lucrative races, the owners and trainers perhaps feeling that if the horse has neither the talent for the big stakes nor the breeding capability, then a smaller-than-hoped-for return on investment from cheaper races is better than none.
Oh, if you wanna get fancy, the veterinary term is cryptorchid. 
Pacers are indeed faster than trotters. But not a great deal – about 6-7% faster.
There is the claim that pacers use less energy than trotters, so that over a longer race, the pacers would do even better than this. But that’s still unproven, since most races (either trotter or pacer) only go for a mile or mile and a half. And most trotter owners are unwilling to risk damage to their horses by running a long race.
Now that would make reading the past performances in the Daily Racing Form a real challenge–does “B.c.3” mean a three-year-old bay colt, or a three-year-old bay cryptorchid?
Seriously, though, thanks for the info. I found out about ridgelings while perusing old (in some cases, very old) result charts and past performances in the DRF. In such abbreviations as “B.c.3,” I knew what c and h and g meant, as well as f and m, but I was puzzled by r. It turned out to mean ridgeling. Yes, they did once run (poor things), but as far as I can tell, it’s been years since a ridgeling has been entered in a race. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was now prohibited.
This is correct, but to further clarify the terminology:
Trotting, as mentioned, means diagonal pairs move together. “Diagonal pair” means left hind (leg)/right fore (leg) move together as do right hind/left fore.
Pacing (again as mention) means right hind/right fore and left hind/left fore move together.
Except for the aforementioned quarter horse and arabian races, most “ridden” races are run by thoroughbreds. I don’t think you could enter a quarter horse against a thoroughbred in a sanctioned race even if you wanted to. Don’t most horses qualified in sacntioned races have to be registered to run? That means you need to prove their pedigree (which includes live cover–foals conceived by artificial insemination can’t be registered).
That’s correct, only Jockey Club registered horses can run in Jockey Club sanctioned races - they must prove their parentage and have a JC indetifying tatoo. It would be patently impossible for a standardbred, QH or any other breed to run in a sanctioned Tbred race.
In case you’re wondering how the Black Stallion ran in a match race against the thoroughbreds Cyclone and Sun Raider, in 1948 the JC studbook was still open to part-Arabs. 
(horsegeek!)
A horse with an undescended testicle is cryptorchid. A horse born with only one testicle is monorchid.
A ridgeling is, as I understand it, any horse who has been gelded but behaves as if he hadn’t been. This can include cryptorchids (whose undescended testicle continues to produce testosterone), horses who were “incompletely” gelded (part of a testicle has been left behind), horses continue to produce high enough levels of testosterone after being gelded, and horses who were gelded late.
Monorchid and cryptorchid horses are usually gelded if the breed organization will not register a monorchid or a cryptorchid (some won’t, since the condition appears to be inherited). Cryptorchism is a nuisance for the owner - the horse may not be registerable in his natural state, surgery is expensive and risky, the horse may be sub-fertile because the abdominal cavity is too warm to produce really good sperm but he’s still going to have the usual annoying stallion behavior.
If you really want to talk about interesting race horses, the Akhal-Teke is a breed used in endurance races of several hundred miles in central asia (namely, Turkmenistan).
Really? As someone whose only experience with registered breeding is in cattle, this strikes me as bizarre. What’s the reason? Fear of fraudulent semen sales? (No, really, we have a whole bunch of Secretariat’s stuff in the freezer. Guaranteed still viable, and at this price how could you refuse?) Or is it just conservatism?