It has been a love affair ever since.
Horse racing became an organized sport in all the civilizations from Central Asia to the Mediterranean, historians have recorded. By 638 BC, chariot and horse racing were events in the Greek Olympics.
Then the Romans embraced the sport.
By the 12th Century, English knights returned from the Crusades with swift Arabian horses. Over the next several hundred years, an increasing number of Arabian stallions were imported and bred to English mares, producing horses that combined speed and endurance.
Racing in England is recorded at York as far back as 1530. Ten years later, Chester had its first race course. Two-horse match races for a private wager became popular among the nobility. That's why today horse racing is still known as the Sport of Kings.
It began to evolve into a professional sport during Queen Anne's reign (1702-14) when match races gave way to competition between several horses on which spectators bet.
Tracks sprang up throughout England and purses were boosted to attract the best thoroughbreds. In turn, the purses made breeding and owning race horses profitable.
In 1750, racing elite met at Newmarket to form the Jockey Club, which still exercises complete control over the sport in England.
A century earlier, British settlers brought horse racing to the New World. The first American track was laid out in 1665 at Long Island.
For the next two centuries, tracks popped up and disappeared around the New York area. The tracks were operated by the rich and famous to showcase their horses.
It wasn't until the Civil War that entrepreneurs began treating the sport as a business -- organizing and promoting betting by the general public.
John Hunter, William R. Travers and former American heavyweight champion John Morrissey had a track built at the popular summer health resort in Saratoga Springs. The inaugural meeting was conducted in 1864 and America's oldest stakes race was staged -- the Travers, named for the first president of Saratoga.
Ironically, it was won by a horse named Kentucky when the purse was $2,950.
The race, 1 3/4 miles prior to 1890, was not run in 1896, 1898-99, 1900 and 1911-12. It was 1 1/2 miles from 1890 to '92, 1 1/8 miles in 1895 and from 1901 to '03 -- and 1 1/4 miles since 1904.
A half-dozen fillies have won the Travers, the last in 1903 by Ada Nay.
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