BREEDER

Italian horse breeders have an excellent reputation at the worldwide level, thanks to our enormous cultural heritage that is inspired by the work and research done by Federico Tesio.

Breeding constitutes the foundation of the entire horse racing sector: through the careful selection of the best stallions and the best mares, breeding aims to achieve a continuous improvement in colts in order to raise the value, and not only the economic value, of the horses introduced to competitive racing.

Italian breeders are also well-known for excellence in the breeding of trot horses, and in fact there exists a specific breed of Italian trot horses.

OWNER

The owners are the owners of stables, which are duly registered – each stable has its own symbol and univocal colors – and it is their investments that constitute the founding pillar of the horse racing sector.

Each owner makes his own decisions on which horses and how many horses to purchase, to which trainers to entrust them, and in which races to have them participate, and with which jockeys or drivers. Situations in which owners are also trainers are not uncommon.

TRAINER

Passion, patience, capacity to “understand” every single horse. A trainer has to have these characteristics. He must literally teach each horse to run to the best of his abilities, teach the fastest and most effective trot step, understand which terrain and which distances are most suited to a gallop horse. It is his eye, his experience and his dialogue with drivers that allows all of the preferences for each horse to be defined, whether he prefers sprint distances of 1,000 meters or “long-distance” distances of 2,400 meters, whether he excels running in front of competitors or starting from behind and catching up with the group at a decisive moment, whether he prefers to run on perfect terrain or whether his endurance renders him unbeatable on long distances or whether he is more suited to flat races or hurdle races.

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

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 basis 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 trotting 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/harness 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/harness race in the world, which is run every year at the Paris racetrack Vincennes over a distance of 2,700 meters.

In trot/harness 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 beams”: 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 beams 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 beams does not take place within the track but rather on a sort of external appendix to the track called the “racket”: at Montecatini Terme, the racket is traced in the warm-up track within the main track.

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.

Each year, the Montecatini Terme racetrack hosts several mounted trot/harness races that are very popular with Sesana spectators.