HANDICAPPING WILL NOT BE POPULAR.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume IX, Issue 694, 25 June 1903, Page 15

HANDICAPPING WILL NOT BE POPULAR.

The American trotter is not, nor was, ever, intended to be a draft horse, hence - 1 the utter uselessness of all talk of handi-. capping by weight ever becoming popular, on the harness racing track,s. What pleasure would the lover of harness 1 racing! derive in seeing Cresceus try to draw j 2501bsi faster than some ordinary horse, could draw 1251bs ? In such a contest | Cresceus might trot a mile that would.; really be a more creditable performance' than his record mile, but as it would, of necessity, be slower than his best record drawing regulation weight, he would never, receive the full credit of it in the record' tables. Once introduce handicapping by. weight, and the whole system of keeping J records and estimating the value of horses ; from a speed standpoint would have to be! established. Speed and the ability to carry a fast, clip through a race of heats 1 would no longer be the proof of a horse’s ' merit. Any trotter, no matter how fast and how game he may be, can be made J to drop back and perform in a mediocre manner, if he is given a heavy enough load to pull. There would be no glory in making a really great horse appear mediocre by giving him a load heavy enough to make him no better than a horse vastly his inferior, and it is safe to say that, not until the conditions surrounding harness racing become very much different than they are now-, will the proposition to do so be received with any favour. At present, fortunately, there is no need to resort to handicapping to equalise the changes of thej horses seen each year on the harness tracks,. Tn the slower classes there is. never any considerable length of time when one horse can easily beat all the others being raced in the open events. In the fast class.. , too, there is nothing near the inequality there was a score or more years ago, when there were no more than four or five horses available for the free-for-all class. To-day, who can name, with any certainty, a trotter with a record between 2:05 and 2:08, that can beat all the others with records between those figures ? There will nearly always -be one trotter and one pacer that will be regarded as a little better than any other trotter or pacer, but aside from the actual championship holder, there will always be enough high-class performers eligible to the different classes to provide good contests without the necessity of resorting to handicapping. —(“ Horse World.”)