A horse race is a contest of speed or stamina between a number of horses. It is one of the oldest sports and has evolved from a primitive contest between two horses to a spectacle involving huge fields of runners, sophisticated electronic monitoring equipment, and immense sums of money. Its basic concept, however, remains unchanged over centuries. There are essentially three types of people in horse racing. There are the crooks who dangerously drug their horses and then dare the industry to catch them. There are the dupes who labor under the fantasy that horse racing is broadly fair and honest. And there are the masses in the middle – honorable souls who know that the industry is more crooked than it ought to be but who don’t do all they can to fix it.

The sport depends on a high turn-over rate, with thousands of horses leaving the industry each year as foals, during training, or when they are retired. Thousands more leave prematurely, a fate that raises serious concerns about the welfare of the horses.

In order to compete with the booming entertainment industry, horse races must offer big purses. This creates a major incentive for horsemen to run horses that have no business being on the track. Pushed beyond their limits, these horses are subjected to cocktails of legal and illegal drugs and often break down. This is an underlying cause of the high mortality rate in the sport.

To make up for this, race organizers jacked up the purses even further by introducing a system of handicapping. In this system, a horse’s age, sex, birthplace and previous performance are used to adjust the weight that it must carry. The racers who carry the lowest weight are considered to have the best chances of winning.

As the sport grew in popularity, it became necessary to organize horse races into standardized events with larger fields. In 1731 the first King’s Plates were standardized, with six-year-olds carrying 168 pounds in four-mile heats. Then, in 1751, five-year-olds and four-year-olds were admitted to the races and heats were shortened to 2 miles.

The modern horse race is an international affair, with major events held around the world including the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in France, the Melbourne Cup and Sydney Cup in Australia, the Caulfield and Durban Cups in South Africa, and the Gran Premio Clasico Simon Bolivar in Venezuela. The majority of the purse money for these events is put up by commercial sponsors. In addition, the racing syndicates of wealthy individuals and institutional investors also contribute to the prize funds. This means that many of the richest horse races are sponsored events. These are sometimes known as group races. They are popular with bettors and often feature the most exciting betting action. However, they are also the most difficult to win, because only a handful of horses can finish ahead of the leader in each race. As a result, group races tend to produce close and thrilling finishes.