By Scott Wells
President & General Manager
Here are a couple of tips and you don’t even have to bet a dime. You’ll just impress your friends with your incredible knowledge:
The biggest races at Remington Park are “futurities.” Most people don’t even know what that term means. YOU, however, will now have the inside information. A “futurity” is a race for which the owners of the horses make a series of payments into a “purse account” over a period of time (usually several hundred dollars every few months for about a year). Since hundreds of owners often nominate several horses each to make them eligible for a race to be held at a future date (hence the term “futurity”), the purse pool accumulates a lot of money—plus interest. On a specified date, a couple of hundred horses (all those which remain eligible by way of the payments) compete in time trials to determine which ten horses will qualify to run at the accumulated money in the purse account for that “futurity.” In the time trials, each horse is electronically timed to the thousandth of a second. Those who record the ten fastest times (regardless of whether they run first in their “trial heat” or not) qualify to run in the “final” of the futurity. The Big Three futurities at Remington Park will have purses this year of $326,000 for the Oklahoma Futurity (March 19) , $1,000,000 for the Remington Park Futurity (April 16) and $1,000,000 for the Heritage Place Futurity (May 28). So far, no horse has ever won all three.
Here’s another thing about “futurities”—they are restricted to horses which are two years old. That’s so the competition will be more equal. The same thing with “derbies.” Any race with the name “derby” is for three-year-olds only.
So now you know more about horse racing than the average sports fan!
Visit the Remington Park website for more info: http://www.remingtonpark.com/
