Handicapping

Handicapping is the practice of assigning higher rated horses extra weight to carry in order to give lesser horses a chance to win the race. This was supposed to make the races more "fair".

The general rule of thumb for Handicapping is that added weight will slow a horse down enough to cost him speed at distances of 1 mile and further, though Handicapping was done on even the youngest horses in Man o' War'stories time, this practice usually is applied to older horses with most races carrying the same weight for all horses in the race.

Man o' War carried more weight as a two-year-old than almost any American Thoroughbred any time in their whole career. As a two-year old he was consistently assigned 130 pounds when it became obvious that no other horse could get near him. As a three-year-old, he carried up to 138 pounds (in the Potomac Handicap), weights hardly heard of in modern American racing.

They just couldn't slow him down.