This is great stuff!!
 

From the Daily Racing Form: October 4th 1913








OK -- so.

The leader is believed to bleed during the race, his jockey keeps riding him anyway...the leader falls down and takes everyone except two horses down with him in a spill that must have looked like the recent Charles Town disaster.

Two horses finish the race.

A stableboy decides to jump on the back of the horse who caused the spill -- and rides him around the track while the horse is bleeding visably from his nostrils.

The bettors who played said horse to show become enraged when they don't get paid -- and storm the track in protest. A riot occurs and lasts while horses are still on the track for the next race!

The obviously powerless powers that be decide to refund all show bets and cancel the rest of the card.

When you think of the glory days of horse racing you think of a glorious time when bettors played against a relatively microscopic takeout and the government regulation that has strangled this sport now wasn't in play. However, an incident like that truly is insane Wild West stuff.

I think this would have made the next season of Deadwood.

Cool story.

It was a lucky find. I was just doing a little research of bleeding and bleeders in the DRF Archive.

In those days before lasix and the advancement of medicines -- some of the sports major racetracks in America would bar the entry of bleeders. The thinking was along these lines ....




Rules for the opening of Pimlico 100 years ago to the day:




In Australia -- a horse who has bled twice is not even permitted to race anywhere in the country:




Example of how it gets reported: (also note that jockeys would be suspended left and right today)

$200 is a pretty stiff fine during that era. Using inflation calculators, that's like $4,600 today.

I wanna know what horse tore up E.W. Heffner. If it was one of his own.

Perhaps an early relative of Dynaformer .... :D

Yep -- pretty stiff fine.

Here's a pretty colorful piece on a very popular horse getting barred for bleeding...

Harry D raced 20 times in 81 days? Did I read that right? Wow.

They didn't mess around in those days.

Seabiscuit made 35 starts by November 11th of his two-year-old season and was one of the most well traveled and accomplished older horses in racing history.

The worktabs were equally wild. They'd put them through a meat-grinder schedule and have them work every three days.

Horses were demanded to be tough and campaign hard. As shown above, some of the major tracks wouldn't even accept the entry of a horse who showed visable signs of bleeding after a race.

I would think trainers and vets would be more skilled with a bleeder in no-lasix early 1990's New York or Europe today. In the old days they appearently did stuff like tying horses uncomfortably with their heads forced upward all day as a method to hopefully prevent bleeding. Today, they probably have a more expensive alternative to lasix that would help them not bleed.

Here's an example of what was considered a legendary training job with a bleeder for many decades afterwards. Hermit's win in the 1867 English Derby at Epsom.




Hermit came in the Derby off of a 10-month layoff. A week before the Derby he pulled up from a workout with blood pouring from his nostrils.




Chaplin eventually won over 100,000 pounds on the race (a large sum for a betting score in 1867)




Hermit's Wiki page is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermit_%28horse%29

I could only imagine what the article in the Times looked like the next day :rolleyes:.

The Toronto Sun wrote a column critical of the crowds behavior that day.