A few weeks ago, I met someone who mentioned she used to be involved in chariot racing.
“Chariots?” I asked. “Like in ancient Roman days?”
“Sort of.” she said. She explained how today’s chariot racing in the Intermountain West involves two horses pulling a small aluminum chariot with the driver standing in the cart.
She mentioned the Regional Championships were coming up at the Golden Spike Arena in Ogden that weekend. So on Saturday, I jumped in my car . I got to the Arena just after the first race.
As I was strolling up to the rail running along the side of the racetrack, the horses in the next race shot by me. I was a little stunned by the hammering of the hooves on the dry dirt, the jangling of the harnesses, the strange whirring of the bicycle wheels — let alone the screaming of the spectators.
For the horses, it was an all out sprint for a quarter mile and it was over in 21 seconds.
In Roman times, the races lasted much longer. A typical race went 7 laps on a U-shaped racetrack with dangerously tight turns on both ends. Wealthy Roman Citizens owned the horses, but they usually sent a slave to drive the team. A crowd favorite was the daredevil slave charioteer Scorpius, who won 2,048 races before he died in a crash at the age of 26. Stories of chariot racing go all the way back to Homer’s Iliad where the Spartan king Menelaus was accused of cheating in a chariot race.
Rome’s racetrack was called the Circus Maximus and it could seat 250,000 spectators.
Back in Pioneer times in Utah, farmers liked to brag about how fast their horses could go, so challenges were made, and the issue usually settled by an informal race. The first official chariot race took place down the main street in Jackson Wyoming in 1950. For the following decades, chariot racing was very popular. Hundreds of teams would show up at the local races.
Going back to the Golden Spike racetrack, I walked up to where the races were starting. I asked if I could get close and climb up on the sidebars of the starting gate and they said ,”Sure.” From there I got an eyeball-to-eyeball view of the horses impatiently banging around in the starting chutes.
I think I was expecting a “Ready, Set, Go” and a starter pistol fired into the air. What I got was a mighty clang of metal on metal when the starter pulled a lever. The gates slammed open, the horses lunged forward, and dirt flew by me.
When the dust finally settled, the days winners were a team from Logan, who clocked in at 20.40 seconds – just 3 hundredths of a second off the world record.
On the way out I stopped to talk to three old timers still standing around chewing the fat.
“The sport is dying out,” one said.
“It’s getting expensive to keep a horse,” said the second.
The third summed it all up for me:
“Used to be you were really someone if you had a car. Now you’re really someone if you have a horse.”
This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild about all the horses in Utah.
Credits:
Photos: Courtesy and Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Chariot Racing Team, Courtesy and Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Anderson, Howe, and Wakeman Utah Public Radio upr.org
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Additional Reading
Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings
https://www.facebook.com/reel/917556147927681 Courtesy Wendy Wilker
American Chariot Racing, https://www.goldenspikeeventcenter.com/event-details/acr-chariot-races-7
World Chariots, https://www.goldenspikeeventcenter.com/event-details/world-chariots-8
