| HISTORY |
SET IN STONE
LISSA OLIVER DISCOVERS FAIR PLAY FOR OWNERS WAS CARVED IN FIRST CENTURY STONE!
| MAGAZINE 2022 |
R
acing has always been very much rooted in its past, but that past extends a good deal further back than the known “founding fathers” of the Byerley, Darley and Godolphin Arabians. In 2016, Professor Hasan Bahar excavated from the ruins of an ancient racecourse in BeyÅŸehir, in Anatolia, Turkey, a set of 2,000-year-old Rules of racing. Prior to this, racing’s earliest known rules had been laid down with the foundation of The Jockey Club in Britain in 1750. There are records of racemeetings taking place in Roman Britain in A.D. 300 and there is evidence that the lands of Queen Boudica and her Iceni tribe, in and around what is now Newmarket, housed stud farms that supplied racehorses to Rome during the first century. Boudica’s stud later became part of the Tudor Royal Studs. Prof. Bahar unearthed a First Century monument erected in honour of the Roman jockey Lukuyanus, who died at an early age in Asia Minor. Impressive Roman monuments to jockeys and charioteers are not unusual, as they were accorded a status only reserved for the MGM-era Hollywood icons of the modern age. Diocles, for example, retired in A.D. 150 a multi-millionaire in modern currency. Portraits of the great horses and popular charioteers hung in every Roman home and it is said they could do no wrong, a blind eye turned to any public misdemeanour. What set the monument to Lukuyanus apart, however, was a stone tablet set within it, detailing the rules of racing. “I’ve never seen a similar tablet that contains the rules of sports and the way the race is carried out,” says Prof. Bahar. “There are sources that mention horseracing, but there weren’t any that described the rules. Th is tablet is the oldest one describing the rules of horse racing.” The inscription on the tablet reveals that there was a keen sense of fairness in the sport. Prof. Bahar translates, “It says that if a horse comes in
Prof. Hasan Bahar with the rules of racing
THIS TABLET IS THE OLDEST ONE DESCRIBING THE RULES OF RACING first place in a race it cannot participate in other races at the meeting. A winning owner was also forbidden from entering any other horses into an event’s subsequent races, presumably to give others a chance at glory. This was a beautiful rule, showing that races back then were based on gentlemanly conduct.” Horseracing was extremely popular and big business throughout the Roman period. The
circus was purpose-built for racing and the racetracks were uniformly long rectangles with rounded ends, over which seven laps of 568m each (just under three furlongs) were run for every race, totalling two and a half miles. During my own extensive research when penning the biography of keen horseman and racing enthusiast Emperor Nero (A.D. 37-68), I was delighted to learn he introduced legislation for pensions for retired racehorses, having recognised a former racehorse pulling a cart through the city’s streets. Subsequently, racehorses, State-owned during their careers, were allotted a small pension to cover their feed, veterinary and hoof care, enabling them to retire to farms at no fi nancial inconvenience to the farmer. During the period Lukuyanus raced and the discovered rules covered, there 159 public
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