THEY’RE OFF!

The crashing of gates flung open, the ringing of the starter’s bell and the unleased fury of a cavalry charge of horses is how we experience the start of a thoroughbred race. At a harness track, an automobile with track-spanning gates hinged to the rear bumpers brings the trotters and their sulkies from a standing start slowly up to speed before the gates are swung forward and the auto speeds away to give the drivers an open track. At the Red Mile in Lexington, the automobile is a 1995 Cadillac Fleetwood, the rear seats modified, raised and reversed so the starter can look backward to watch the horses and sulkies. The gate is sixty feet wide.⁷⁰

It wasn’t always so easy to get a fair start.

When a race was a match race between two horses over a long distance, it was not difficult to start; but as the field of horses in a race increased and the distance shortened, it became much more difficult.⁷¹ Although the dictionary does not relate the origins of the noun jockey, meaning the rider, and the verb jockey, meaning to move around to attempt to get a better position, it appears the two meanings came into use about the same time, as riders would jockey for an advantage at the start. Starting methods varied. One starter is quoted as saying, “I shall require you all to draw up about forty or fifty yards behind the post, walk gently up to it, and when I remove my hat from my head and say ‘Go’ it will be a start.”⁷²

Other starts at times were effected by holding a rope across the track; the race started when it dropped. An advertisement in a New York City newspaper in 1781 pleaded for the return of “seventy yards” of new white rope to be used at the races, offering a twenty-guinea reward.⁷³ Other methods included the dropping or waving of a flag. One writer described it as the “fine old art of the man with the red flag, facing a crowd of 10,000 people with 15 or so thoroughbreds to line up.”⁷⁴ Robes, ribbons and even wooden barriers were tried.⁷⁵

By the later years of the nineteenth century, inventors were coming up with mechanical alternatives. An early version involved a large heavy strip of rubber held by the starter on one end and an assistant on the other. This ultimately was discarded as the riders discovered it was nothing more than a huge rubber band that they could move into and stretch into an advanced starting position.⁷⁶

The most successful was the “Gray Gate,” designed by Reuben G. Gray of Sydney, Australia. It consisted of six strands of dark-brown heavy rope strung on a frame that stretched across the track. The frame in turn was rigged onto poles set in concrete with pullies, weights and ropes. Initially set at four and a half feet off the ground to the bottom rope, when released, it sprang up to a height of twelve feet, clearing the way for the horses to start. It even had the innovation of having small tags with numbers on the top rope to indicate where a numbered horse should line up. It became the standard starting machine around the world in the early decades of the twentieth century.⁷⁷

Jockeys were not pleased with the new machines. Not only did they reduce their ability to “jockey” for position at the start, but the machines also affected them personally. Jockeys were fined for infractions on the track, mostly at the start; but the number of infractions at the start radically decreased. Latonia collected $800 in 1895, but only $50 the next year when a gate was installed. These monies went into a fund to help injured jockeys so the size of the fund diminished.⁷⁸

Hoyt Clay Puett was credited by the Lexington Herald Leader in 1973 with being the inventor of an electronic starting gate, replacing manual operations.⁷⁹ His gates had slots for each horse, metal front gates and padded rear panels. The electric latch was modeled on bomb-release mechanisms in military aircraft, and the locks were released by pulling a trigger.⁸⁰

However, following a similar story in the Daily Racing Form in 1994 crediting Puett, a descendant of Marshall Cassidy asserted that Cassidy had invented the modern gate with front doors on individual slots, webbing at the back, overhead partitions and steerable wheels for moving at a track in Mexico in 1930, crediting Puett only with taking those innovations and starting a successful gate construction firm.⁸¹

Starting gate. Bill Straus.

Along the way, metal extensions were tried, about four feet long and welded to the doors of the gate with a series of seventeen rubber rollers. Intended to guide the horses as they started, in fact, they caused an increase in injuries at the start; this model was discontinued.⁸²

Today, there are two kinds of gates, the United Gate with flat front doors and the Pruett Gate with V-shaped doors.⁸³ Both are locked closed by strong electromagnets. When the starter presses the button, the current is released and powerful springs yank open the gate doors.