BREEDER

Italian horse breeding is renowned for its excellence at the worldwide level, founded on rich long-standing tradition and culture inspired by the works and research of Federico Tesio.

Breeding constitutes the founding basis of the entire horse racing sector: through a careful selection of the best stallions and the best mares, aims to achieve on-going improvements in foals to increase the value, and not merely the economic value, of the horses selected for racing.

For trotting races as well, Italian breeding has achieved levels of excellence, and in fact there exists a specific breed of Italian trotting horse.

OWNER

These are the owners of the stables, who are duly registered – each stable has its own symbol and univocal colors – and their investments constitute the cornerstone of the horse racing industry.

Each owner decides which horses and how many horses to purchase, to which trainers to assign them, which races to have them compete in, with which jockeys or drivers. It is not rare for owners to also be breeders.

TRAINER

Passion, patience, capacity to “understand” every single horse. A trainer has to have all of these traits. He must literally teach each horse how to run to the best of his ability, teach the fastest and most effective trot step, understand what type of terrain and what distances are the most suited to a gallop horse. His eye, experence and dialogue with the jockeys allow him to define all preferences for each horse, and in other words whether he prefers sprint distances of 1,000 meters or “long-distance” of 2,400 meters, if the horse does best running in front or charging ahead from the back at the decisive moment, if he prefers to run on perfect terrain or if his endurance renders him unbeatable on long distances or if he is more suited to level/flat racecs or hurdle races.

Perhaps a trainer does not necessarily have to know how to “whisper” to a horse, but he must certainly know how to listen to him.

VETERINARIAN

The well-being of the horse is the first and foremost priority: the veterinarians have the task of monitoring the horses’ state of health and fitness and, where necessary, they intervene with the most appropriate therapies. In this case as well, an infinite level of sensivity is needed: a human patient can talk to his physician about his state of illness, which body part is in pain or discomfort, while a veterinarian must understand this on his own, on the bassis of his experience with and knowledge of horses.

At every racetrack, during the race days, veterinarians are in attendance to verify that each horse, before making his entrance on the track, is perfectly capable of running, and to check the actual identity of each horse. Other veterinarians are in charge of performing checks and taking antidoping samples.

DRIVER

He is the equivalent of the jockey, but in the case of trot races, he sits behind the horse, on a special seat called a sulky. Once in cases of mounted trotting races, he sits in the horse’s saddle and in this case is called a jockey, like in gallop racing. In trot racing, drivers are often also the owners and trainers of the horses.

Unlike in the case of gallop racing, the trot drivers always race with jackets having the driver’s colors and not the colors of the horse’s stable.

TROT RACES

In the trot, which is the intermediate gait between walking and galloping, the horse proceeds by resting his hooves diagonally and simultaneously: the back right with the front left, the back left with the front right.

The use of the “sulky”, the seat attached to the horse on which the driver sits, is a characteristics of trot races.

In trot races, the horses reach a speed of up to approximately 55 km/h, and run distances ranging, in general, between 1,600 and 2,400 meters: in rare cases, they run greater distances, such as, for example, in the Prix d’Amerique, which is the most prestigious trot race in the world, which is run every year at the Paris racetrack Vincennes over a distance of 2,700 meters.

In trot races, the start may take place in two ways: either through an autostart (a vehicle endowed with “wings” behind which the horse are arranged and at the time of the start of the race, the autostart accelerates and closes its wings, signaling the start of the race), or using “electronic ribbons”: in this case, the horses are aligned for the small trot race going either against or perpendicular to the direction of the race, at the time of the start signal, they must complete, within three seconds, a rotation of 180 or 90 degrees in order to start the race. The electronic ribbons allow for the participation of a higher number of horses as compared with starts using the autostart, which usually are used for races with not more than 12-16 trotters at the start.

In certain cases, the start using ribbons does not take place within the track but rather on a sort of external appendix to the track called the “racket”.

MOUNTED TROT

The mounted trot is a specialty that is very widespread in France, and is on the rise in Sweden, but in Italy still has few enthusiasts. In these races, the sulky is not used, but rather specialized jockeys (specialized in riding horses racing with this gait) ride the horses in a saddle.