The horse racing record I’m referring to is Secretariat, the legendary racehorse who set an astonishing record in the 1973 Belmont Stakes. Secretariat completed the race in 2:24, which is still the fastest time ever run for the 1.5 mile Belmont Stakes.
This record has never been beaten. Despite numerous attempts and advancements in training and technology, no other horse has surpassed Secretariat’s performance in the Belmont Stakes or his overall speed in that race.
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The fastest human running speed, set by Usain Bolt in 2009, is probably near the peak. The last century of sport has been more about reaching potential, not improving. Over a similar time period, humans selectively bred horses, and the fastest recorded was in 2008, not 1973. Winning Brew set this record across two furlongs at Penn National.
The similar time period I mention is modern athletic and biological science, about 125 years to date.
Additionally, top speed for horses is not necessarily the point, and neither is it for humans. Usain Bolt cannot maintain that speed for more than 100 yards, and neither can Secretariat do so for an entire race.
The future may hold more for us and horses, but across a timeline, physical progress has been about the same for measuring top speed.
Interesting question! Here is a good article comparing the two and trying to interpret the data https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2655236/
It might also be because horses have been bred and raced professionally for longer than human races have been conducted at such a level (and no selective breeding). So, as the article also mentions, horses could be near their physiological limits and Secretariat was a once in a century (genetic?) outlier.
Very rarely racehorses break a leg because the bones are too weak to withstand the force of impact that.is generated, which also indicates that they probably cannot get dramatically faster.
Secretariat’s necropsy revealed an abnormally enlarged heart that provided a significantly larger circulation of oxygenated blood to the muscles than ‘normal’ race horses. This likely contributed to Secretariat’s ease of speed and stamina on the track.
I suspect the raw numbers make more outliers available among humans.
There’s about 140 million humans born each year. Only about 100 thousand thoroughbred horses are born each year.
The upper end of the distribution of human talent has more individuals, as compared to horses. More chances to find that one incredible performer.
There are physiological limits on speed. You might be able to breed a horse that is just a bit faster than the record holders but we are up at the limits already I am pretty sure. A horse as it is built can only go so fast.
Law of diminishing returns.
We’ve been breeding and racing horses for at least 2000 generations. Speed has always been the goal.
Genetics, drugs, exercise strategies, nutrition, and probably a few things no one talks about.
This is the limit.
Unfortunately, the most likely explanation is that remarkable race horses in history were drugged with steroids or other performance enhancing chemicals. They didn’t do any drug testing on horses until more recently. Now it’s routine.
Humans really haven’t gotten faster in terms of potential, but in terms of time and selection.
Humans habe been breeding race horses for centuries – millenia? And horses dont do like the first 4 min mile guy and kind of train on the side, in between classes. They just train. Like Humans do now.
We as Humans also are pooling more people into a global awareness and producing intense amounts of people..
There are an estimated 60 million horses in the world, and 8 billion people. There are less Horses than Germans. Less horses than Ethiopians. Less Horses than Brazilians. Etc.
So even there, your pool of freaks is smaller. Our sports became big money and we have 8 billion people to find the freaks from. If there is a 1 in 60 million freak of sport, we have over 100 people who are said freak to be found.
If there is a 1 in 60 million freak horse, there is 0 – 1 to be found. Maybe.
Hey, a subject I know about that isn’t opera! You are actually comparing apples to oranges here. You are talking about fast horses, but not defining what you mean by fast.
Secretariat, while undisputably the greatest Thoroughbred ever to run, is not the fastest horse ever. In fact, he isn’t in the top 10 or 20 with regards to top speed. That would be some quarter horse in a sub 440 yard race. Remember, you’re talking about speed.. not endurance.
That said, quarter horses also have sort of reached the end of their possible speed. Most AQHA records were set in the last 10 or 15 years, so at least are pretty recent.
I think that part of the problem is inbreeding. If a horse wins the triple crown, it becomes a stud where it can have hundreds of children. 100,000 thoroughbred foals are registered each year, but the number of fathers is substantially less than that. The stud system initially worked, but eventually, it led to stagnation where they hit a limit of what could be done with the existing set of genes.
Even if we set aside biology as a factor, there is only so much speed you can get out of any given mechanical system.
This is going to sound unrelated, but stick with me.
There’s a reason there are so many different engine types, makes, models, etc. Ranging from sterling to jet turbine to wankle to ICE, we have developed many different engine types over the years. The type I know the most about are ICE (internal combustion engines, generally used to describe gasoline engines) so I will use those as an example.
Even in that category, you have fundamentally different types of engines. Both 2-stroke and 4-stroke engines (2-stroke are typically found on smaller gasoline driven objects like yard tools, and 4-stroke on larger objects like cars) are ICE, but run on very different concepts.
I know a wider variety of 4-stroke, so I’ll focus on those. Within the category of 4-stoke engines, you have a wide variety of shapes, sizes, speeds, materials, etc. Would you like 1 cylinder? 2? 3? 4? 5? 6? I have heard of 4-stroke engines using every number of cylinders up through 12, and I’ve heard of 16 and 24 cylinder 4-stroke engines. All of them serve different purposes. What about shape? In line? Horizontally opposed? V? W? Radial? Again, all get used, and all serve different purposes.
Cars were stuck for a few years at around the 250 mph mark. Then we made pretty big strides in the air ramming department (turbochargers and superchargers), and have now breached the 300mph mark.
Even with that, we are approaching (according to my mechanical engineering professors) the limit of what we can squeeze out of ICE motors. There is only so much heat dissipation we can do, only so many RPMs we can get, only so many cylinders, and we are reaching the limit. There’s a reason farming and mining equipment uses diesel fuel, why airplanes use avgas, and why aircraft carriers don’t use a traditional engine at all. There is a limit to what we can get out of those systems, and we are approaching it for many of them.
Every time we have needed to make huge strides in power very quickly, we have developed either new engine types, or new ways to cram air and/or fuel into them. When we wanted cars and planes, we had to develop piston engines over steam engines. When we wanted to break the sound barrier, we had to do away with propellers and piston engines and develop jet engines. When we wanted to build massive mining equipment, we did away with gasoline and used diesel. Space travel requires wholly new types of fuel that have to be manufactured fully synthetically. When we reached the limit of carbureted engines, we developed fuel injection.
For man-made objects, we innovate to get faster, stronger, lighter, and just all around better.
But biology can’t do that. Sure, evolution is a thing, but it doesn’t produce better. Evolution produces “good enough to survive in the current environment.” From that perspective, crocodiles are the best macroscopic life there is. They have been around for hundreds of millions of years with no major changes. They are fundamentally the same as they were 200+ million years ago.
But humans? From a mechanical perspective, humans are dogshit at just about everything. Our backs suck, our hips suck, our feet suck, our bodies are terrible. And horses? Sure, they’re better than we are, but they still suck. Just look at the back problems they have.
Putting skeletal structures aside, tendons can only be so strong, metabolisms so fast and efficient, muscles so powerful, etc. All these things have to fundamentally change to make any meaningful strides in biological speed, and that takes a loooong time. We have made larger advancements in engine technology in the 21st century than biology has in the last 2000 years (as far as horses are concerned). If you compare modern horses to horses from 2000 years ago, they’re bigger, stronger, faster, and better in just about every way I know of except calorie consumption. But not by nearly as much as a Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut is over a Bugatti Veyron.
In all the things that have gotten faster, stronger, more efficient, or just all around better since Secretariat, we have been able to either boost evolution (ie vaccines), or they have been man made. Evolution is slow, and doesn’t select for fastest or strongest. It doesn’t even select for better, it selects for “good enough to reproduce.”
So why haven’t horses gotten meaningfully better? Because evolution doesn’t allow it. Even with human intervention, there is a limit to how quickly tendons and muscles can get stronger, how much force bones can take, how efficiently lungs can process oxygen, how hast hearts can pump, and how efficient metabolisms are. And that limit is best measured in centuries.
How did humans do it? Strength by numbers. Sure, technique, nutrition, exercise science, etc. all helps, but it’s a numbers game. When you get hundreds of millions of tries to make something better every year, it gets better quickly. When you get 1% that iteration count? It takes 100 times longer.
TLDR: Humans got better in the last 100 years partially by science, and partially by shear numbers. Machines did it by innovation. But horses get neither.
Secretariat’s Belmont is one statistically aberrant data point, not a signifier of a trend. 1.5 miles is a rare distance on dirt, so there have not been many chances for horses to break that record in the decades since, and most records have much more to do with track surface than horse quality. The record for 0.75 miles on dirt, which is the most common racing distance in America, was set in 2009 by an entirely unremarkable horse. Tracks can “soup up” their racing surfaces by altering the moisture content and treatment the dirt, but this practice is not very common anymore because it comes with safety concerns. It still happens occasionally due to weather conditions, which is often when you see records fall.
Additionally, horses are getting faster—at the lower end. It’s easier for something to improve when there’s a lot of room for improvement, so what we’ve seen is more of a compression between the top- and lower-end horses vs. a steady linear progression. There are other considerations as well: training methods, breeding priorities, changes in weather patterns (the Derby is much rainier than it used to be, for example), medications (the 70’s were the steroid boom, and there’s evidence that horses got slower for a while after steroids were banned in 2009), and overall race shape (records are much harder to set if the early pace of the race is slow).
So it’s a complicated question for a complicated sport, but the short of it is that a lot more goes into speed records than the actual speed of the horse. Racing fans will always complain that horses these days are worse than they used to be, though… that was true even in the 70’s.
(Source: biologist and lifelong racing fan who has spent a more-than-healthy time analyzing and arguing about this stuff)
Have you seen what a natural wild horse looks like? Horses were all originally the size of ponies or smaller. They’ve already been eugenically bred for thousands of years. Humans have not been breeding themselves for speed anywhere close to that scale. For perspective, cows were originally the size of large dogs.
It’s a lot easier for a human athlete to understand coaches’ directions than it is for a horse to. Athletes are also much more aware of their motivation and task – a horse isn’t going to gripe that they didn’t run near their PB on this morning’s run
Read an article about this recently, and there are several factors, which many of the other comments have addressed but also the tracks have changed, the focus on safe tracks rather than fast tracks, along with Secretariat being outlier among other factors like humans not being selectively bred like horses have been, horses may have reached the highest potential they can reach.
a thing to realise I would like to add is that “fastest” is not a good way to measure “averages” usually.
the absolute top of things usually comes about from genetic outliers who have traits which are exceedingly rare, secretariat had a big ass heart that stemmed from a genetic abnormality.
Currently, the main issue is related to the heart. As others mentioned, Secretariat’s enlarged heart may have given him an advantage, and ongoing research is trying to figure out if we’ve simply hit the physiological limit of what the equine heart can do or if there is a more widespread underlying pathology in the modern Thoroughbred that we haven’t detected.
A significant portion of racehorse deaths are sudden catastrophic cardiac events that often cannot be conclusively linked to any pre-existing condition during postmortem examinations. Hopefully, more widespread screening of cardiac health in horses would give us a better picture of how many of these cardiac deaths are actually caused by existed weakness or deformity as opposed to genuine failure from overexertion, because if we are indeed seeing completely healthy horses just dropping dead from running their hearts out, we will know we have hit a hard physiological limit.
Risk Factors for Exercise-Associated Sudden Cardiac Death in Thoroughbred Racehorses
Sudden cardiac death in racehorses
edit: I didn’t a word
It has been theorised that human performance hasn’t improved much either.
A lot of the gains we see in athletics are likely to have come from equipment. Shoes and track surfaces specifically for running.
Certain Olympic hosts have used surfaces that improved running speeds, to try and increase WR’s being broken.
https://worldathletics.org/competitions/olympic-games/the-xxxiii-olympic-games-7153115/news/article/mondo-ws-ty4-track-tokyo-olympics
If grass horse tracks were replaced with synthetic surfaces, you may well find a similar level of performance improvement.
I think horses have plateaued (particularly at the top end) because they have already maximized the training and nutrition. A horse is owned, if its owner wants the horse to be competitive it will get the best training available. A horses nutrition needs are well understood, and limited bloodlines can improve the genetic abilities of teh horses. Humans are (at the end of the day) self trained and self aware, this leads to inefficiencies in training regimes and availability of “the best” training. Also horses have a shorter lifespan so trial and error in methods and nutrition have a quicker turnaround,
Also I think the fastest humans are about at the biological limits, you don’t see the HUGE gap in speed records that you saw in decades past. and dedicated race runners are starting to have medical issues due to the abuse while actively racing.
Horses cannot be trained and maintained and fed as well as humans can. A success of an athlete is a combination of a hundred things going exceptionally well. For horse, most of those 100 aren’t even available. As the dumbest example, horses can’t get better running shoes. They’ve literally banned some types of swim suits as they made swimmers too fast.
Humans only got marginally faster but not much. Our speed increase is generally due to better equipments and tracks- shoes with better traction, tights with less air drag, and a few running techniques. We are stuck in 9.xx range for 100m dash, and barely sub 2 hours in a marathon.
So to try to answer your question as I understand things, there are a couple of things. One a horse is limitsd on training. A human athlete has the bonus of communication. They understand what they are training for, know how to work out their body to perform specific tasks, and have a drive and commitment to said task. The horse just wants to run. You cant communicate with the horse and explain why it needs to do more fly curls.
Also, genetics. Most horses have been selective bbn ly breed for thousands of years and for the most part we’ve pushed the limit of their genetics. Outside random mutations like as some people pointed out, a ridiculously enlarged heart, or something else. We really cant go much further, we’ve pushed horses to the limits of their genetics. Humans arent much different. The training and tech we give our Olympians, arent really improving times any more. With the exception of some outliers most races with athletes in peak form and proper technique come down to milliseconds, now a days. Take swimming for example, new records are measured in fractions of a second. Not whole seconds.
So to try to answer your question as I understand things, there are a couple of things. One a horse is limitsd on training. A human athlete has the bonus of communication. They understand what they are training for, know how to work out their body to perform specific tasks, and have a drive and commitment to said task. The horse just wants to run. You cant communicate with the horse and explain why it needs to do more fly curls.
Also, genetics. Most horses have been selective bbn ly breed for thousands of years and for the most part we’ve pushed the limit of their genetics. Outside random mutations like as some people pointed out, a ridiculously enlarged heart, or something else. We really cant go much further, we’ve pushed horses to the limits of their genetics. Humans arent much different. The training and tech we give our Olympians, arent really improving times any more. With the exception of some outliers most races with athletes in peak form and proper technique come down to milliseconds, now a days. Take swimming for example, new records are measured in fractions of a second. Not whole seconds.
l think we humans are getting close to maxing out when it comes to speed and endurance type of things. l think a lot of improvement is better track surfaces and that kind of stuff. Lighter track shoes with better grip to run or throw or jump.
Horses have been selectively bred for millennia, that’s the difference. The best and fastest had been carefully bred for so long that there isn’t much to improve on their genetics anymore. And despite technology improving, the biggest factor is still the inherent potential of the animal. Secretariat was a clear outlier, having had an incredibly rare mutation resulting in an abnormally large heart. This is what it takes to break records at this point, freak genetics. And that is something that is pretty much a lottery, even with selective breeding.
Now consider how humans don’t really have century-long pedigrees of elite athletes being selectively bred and you’ll get a gene pool that is much less optimized. It’s easier to find new heights there.
I know it doesn’t really answer your question completely but humans haven’t actually gotten that much faster. A lot of the improvement in sprint times is due to equipment and surfaces rather than humans biologically improving physically. If you took Usain Bolt and transported him back 100 years and made him run on those surfaces with those shoes he wouldn’t run the times he ran. If you took Jesse Owns and brought him into today’s world he’d be an elite sprinter still. I guess one reason could just be not much has changed when it comes to the surface or equipment used in horse races.
I wonder if the secret goo in Secretariat was his mitochondrial genome. This DNA is maternally inherited and can contain subtle variations that change metabolic fitness quite radically.
If this were the case a bunch of horses descended from Secretariat would probably all be slower than him. If he was bred with his mother (I hope they never do this) that would preserve the mitochondria but other problems would ensue.
It’s been said that when Secretariat died, his autopsy revealed a physical anomaly in that his heart was nearly 3 times the size of any other horse. This allowed him to really get oxygen replenishment to his lungs and legs and have far greater endurance than anyone has ever seen.
One of the biggest factors is probably that horses aren’t raced for the purpose of breaking speed records, they’re raced for the purpose of outrunning the other horses in the race. It’s fairly common for races to be won at speeds well below the record times.
There are a host of other factors that affect race times:
– unlike humans, horses aren’t personally motivated to run faster (there are exceptions – some horses love running and/or racing other horses)
– the health/attitude of the horse that day (horses can’t tell you they aren’t feeling their best or don’t like a particular track/environment)
– the skill of the jockey (to this I add the temperament of the horse – some horses need to be handled in specific ways in order to do their best, and the jockey needs to be both aware of this and skilled enough to implement that handling)
– the quality of the track (they aren’t as consistent or heavily curated as racetracks for humans, especially at the lower end of racing
Secretariat was a genetetic freak of nature in a way that made him uniquely good as a racehorse. The ones who come closest to him? His own progeny.
While improved nurture can help, there’s simply a genetic hurdle too big to overcome. Unless we get another horse with the same mutation, or some even more novel freak, he’s basically going to go uncontested.
And last I checked, mutagenic breeding, while accepted for plants, is generally not something practiced for animals, so it might be a while.
One issue is they are not like dogs and cats. No litters, one foal that takes 11 months to be born. Then a year off before a mate can have another baby. That makes selective breeding a much longer cycle than with animals that reproduce in bulk multiple times a year.
As said, race horses are bred for quick development, not longevity or health.
Haven’t gotten faster over time? The record, as you mentioned, was set in 1973. Humans domesticated horses thousands of years ago. Even if that’s an outlier, it’s incredibly recent in the grand scheme of things.
Also, humans have extra advantages such as track and equipment technology: surface composition, starting blocks, highly specialized shoes, low-drag clothing, and so on. I haven’t looked into the numbers myself, but it seems like there’s pretty significant diminishing returns of improvement…almost in line with technology advancement.
Horses, on the other hand, still race in relatively unchanged conditions.
And yes, biological limitations play a huge part. It almost requires a minor genetic mutation to gain a measurable advantage at elite levels any more: a little taller, a specific ratio of upper/lower body length…even upper/lower leg, heart/lung size and strength (eg Secretariat). If these traits were being selected, naturally or artificially, we might see more consistent improvements. Fortunately (ethically) they are not…at least among humans.