Handicapping racehorses

This practice has become relatively rare, Especially for races run by two and three year olds.

Handicapping is the practice of assigning horses different weights, with the higher quality horses assigned higher weights, in order to give other horses in the race a better chance at winning. In the eras of Man o' War and Seabiscuit, even 2-year-Olds (generally considered babies at that age) were not excluded from this practice.

In distance racing, the added weight can slow almost any horse. The general thinking is that each additional pound will slow a horse by one length at distances of one mile or further. If a track handicapper believes a horse would win by 5 lengths he may assign 5 extra pounds to the horse, expecting this to give the other horse a better chance of winning.

Man o' War carried up to 130 pounds as a 2-year-old and up to 140 as a 3-year-old. Other horses were assigned much lighter weights so that Man o' War was "giving" as much as 32 pounds to some of his competitors. Seabiscuit carried these higher weights as well. By contrast, as rules were altered for safety over time, Secretariat was never required to carry over 126 pounds. This is the maximum allowed for 3-year-old races.