Page 12 - June 2005 The Game

12 The Game, June 2005 Your Thoroughbred Racing Community Newspaper
History of the Starting Gate
by Peter Gross
Last January 3rd, on opening day at the rebuilt Gulfstream Racetrack, the first race was at a mile and a sixteenth with the horses leaving the starting gate in front of the stands. After the start, there was a problem with the gate and for almost a minute, the tractor was unable to tow the gate out of the hors- es’ way. Outriders were ordered to the top of the stretch to alert the jockeys to pull up their horses and the race was declared a no-contest.
It was this incident that got me thinking about the starting gate and how it gets no attention, unless something goes wrong.
The starting gate is hardly a modern day innovation. Since the 1890’s there has always been some form of machinery designed to get the horses in a fair and orderly line before the order to go. Before that, however, starting a race presented all manner of chaos and mayhem. Nervous horses would be reluctant to join the proceedings, devious jockeys would try and take a run at the starting line anticipating when the starter would drop his flag, and racing fans were often subjected to extraordinary delays until a satisfactory dispatch had been achieved.
One mind-numbing example is the 1903 American Derby at Washington Park where the horses spent an unfathomable hour and forty minutes at the barrier before an acceptable start was created.
Louis Cauz, the managing director of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame told me about a similar hold-up that involved a Canadian horse,
“At Coney Island Racetrack in 1898, they had 23 horses in the Futurity Stakes for 2 year olds,” he says, “It took them an hour and half to get them away and when they finally got them off, the starter said 23 skidoo and that’s how that expression came to be. Martimus, a Canadian-owned horse, led all the way to win the race.”
But incidents like the two above had horse people begging for a more effi- cient and less exasperating method of starting races. Before the 19th century expired, some tracks had already been experimenting with a variation of the Gray starting gate, which presented a light-weight barrier in front of the hors- es and when it was deemed time to go,
the barrier, which was attached to strong rubber bands, would suddenly spring up and away from the field.
Cauz wrote of early starting gates in his definitive study The Plate: A Royal Tradition,
“In 1896, a starting gate was introduced for the first time at Woodbine in two races, but received faint praise from the Mail and Empire, “It is hardly the kind of thing to soothe the nervousness of a fractious horse. The gate should, no doubt have been used for the Plate race: there were seven false breaks before the flag fell.”
In 1898, for the Queen’s Plate, a starting gate invented by C.H. Pettingill was employed. This contraption was simply an elastic barrier stretched across the track and when a button was pressed, the barrier shot into the air and the horses, hopefully, shot down the stretch.
In 1932, the Waite starting gate was introduced at Woodbine, but it was not particularly popular. The Waite gate was a stationary device, fixed to the ground and was comprised of open stalls without an overhead roof. That year during the King’s Plate, Queensway fretted in the gate and incurred some minor cuts around her legs before taking off and winning the Plate.
That starting method was not employed further by Woodbine.
In 1940, the Clay Pruett gate was used at Woodbine for the first time. To begin a race, the starter activated bomb release gates (does that sound soothing to the fractious horse?). In the Plate that year, Ring Wise, a 13-1 shot, was backing out of the gate as the starter pressed the button. The Ontario Jockey Club sustained scathing criticism for not offering a refund to the poor bettors who had backed Ring Wise.
As just about every starter on the continent tried his hand at inventing a functional gate, perhaps the most bizarre contraption came courtesy of Mills and Frend, who in 1951 unveiled their moving starting gate at Rockingham Park. This gate had the horses loaded into stalls and then the whole machine would lurch forward at about four miles an hour towards the starting line at which point the doors
would be released and the horses, reaping the benefit of a walking start would burst evenly from the gate. Or so one hoped.
In the forties, the mechanical Clark gate was used effectively in Canada. As the accompanying photograph attests, the starter (upper right by the number 1) pushed a lever which opened the stalls.
Since the early fifties, however, there has been little change in the technology of starting gates, simply because the implementation of electro-magnetism is the ideal solution. In fact, the main starting gate at Woodbine is the same one used on opening day in 1956. It’s probably had a few coats of paint, but the principal remains the same. Batteries send an electric current through each stall. When the doors are closed, they are held by the electrically created magnets. When the starter presses the button, the juice is cut off, the magnets lose their hold and each stall opens simultaneously.
Woodbine’s starter is Shane St. Pierre and when it comes time to put horses into the starting gate, he’s like Santa Claus.
He’s making a list and checking it twice
He knows if you’ve been naughty or nice!
“I keep a log,” says St. Pierre,
“I have a schooling list in the race office for bad horses. If a horse is a bad actor in the afternoon, he goes on the
starter’s list and can’t run again until he comes back to school.”
St. Pierre has nine full-time guys and a few spares to help convince several tons of horseflesh to walk in a dignified fashion into a starting gate. And don’t go applying for a job with St. Pierre if you’re offended by pain.
“I’ve seen horses flip over backwards. You get kicked, you get jumped on, you get beat. We got a lot of bruises. We take a bit of a beating,” says St. Pierre.
For years, it was normal to load the horses from the inside out, but St. Pierre prefers to speed up the process, which benefits horses, riders and fans alike.
“We double load up here. In a ten horse field, I’ll try and load 1, 6, then 2,7, then 3, 8 etc. The whole idea is to get them in quicker. If I have a real bad actor I’ll load him last. Some horses I’ll back in because they refuse to go in the normal way. Some horses I have to blindfold to get in. It’s just a psychological thing.”
It’s when all the horses have been loaded that St. Pierre’s unique skills come into play. He has to determine the precise moment when all the horses are ready to go. Racing fans are used to the yelling that takes place moments before a race starts. It’s the jockeys or assistant starters begging for a few more seconds.
“Wait boss! No Boss! Not ready boss!”
And much like the starting gate itself, the gate crew goes unnoticed unless something goes wrong like a horse breaking through the gate and running off or flipping and pinning an unlucky jockey or crew member.
This month’s Queen’s Plate will be the 50th held at Woodbine and every contending horse since 1956 has jumped out of the same starting gate. If you do the math you will see that amounts to about 85,000 times that the starting gate has worked successfully.
We should all have that kind of longevity and reliability.
The mechanical Clark gate was introduced in the 1940’s
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