AROUND THE WORLD
Volume 1 | Week 9
🏆 TOMMY’S REPORT
Four Countries. Four Racing Secrets.
And four things you may never have known.
Sometimes the most fascinating racing stories aren’t about who won or lost. They’re about the little traditions, unusual rules and curious customs we’ve watched for years without ever questioning.
This week we travel to Britain, France, America and Japan. We discover what really happens when officials declare “Weighed In”, why one of the world’s greatest races is changing its rules, what a canoe is doing at Saratoga, and why Japanese jockeys wear those brightly coloured caps.
Four countries. Four discoveries.
And I reckon you’ll never watch racing quite the same way again.
The Race Day Co passport has another four stamps in it.
FROM
The Arc Opens Its Gates
By Finn
I thought I knew the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
Then, while travelling through Europe with Frida, I discovered something that stopped me in my tracks.
A gelding has never been allowed to run in the Arc.
For Australian and New Zealand racing followers, that might sound rather strange.
We’re accustomed to geldings competing at the very highest level. In Australia, even the Victoria Derby, our famous 2500-metre Classic for three-year-olds, is officially open to colts, geldings and fillies.
And historically, Derby winners sometimes backed up just three days later in the Melbourne Cup. Eleven horses completed the Victoria Derby-Melbourne Cup double in the same year, with Skipton in 1940 the last to do it.
So why was France different?
European racing has traditionally placed enormous importance on breeding. Some of its great races, particularly Classics for young horses, are designed not simply to identify brilliant racehorses but potential future breeding stock.
Yet the Arc is different again. It is an international championship for horses aged three and older, and still geldings remained outside the gate.
Until now.
France Galop has announced that from 2027, geldings will be eligible for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe for the first time in the race’s history. The European Pattern Committee approved the change in August.
There’s even a wonderful recent example of why it matters.
Champion gelding Calandagan won the 2025 Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud, a race carrying an automatic Arc berth, yet couldn’t use that ticket because he was a gelding.
That won’t happen from next year.
Racing should treasure its traditions. They’re part of what makes the sport so special.
But occasionally someone asks a wonderfully simple question:
Does it still need to be this way?
In Paris, they’ve answered it.
The gate is opening.
And in 2027, for the first time, a gelding may walk through it.
FROM
Two Little Words: “Weighed In”
By Finn
There are phrases in racing you hear so often that eventually you stop wondering what they mean.
“Weighed in” is one of them.
I was at a British racecourse recently when those familiar words came across the public address system. Everyone carried on. Punters collected. Bookmakers settled. The next race began to occupy people’s thoughts.
But I found myself wondering what had just happened behind the scenes.
Before a race in Britain, the jockey and the equipment the horse will carry are weighed by the Clerk of the Scales. It’s not merely tradition. It ensures that each horse carries the weight allocated to it.
Then comes the race.
Afterwards, the relevant jockeys return with their saddles and present themselves to be weighed again. Under current British rules, that ordinarily includes the riders of the first four horses, or more when additional prize placings require it. The Clerk of the Scales checks that everything is in order and reports any significant discrepancy to the Stewards.
And that’s where those two little words become important.
The Judge must have confirmed the placings. Any relevant objection or Stewards’ enquiry must have been dealt with. The required jockeys must have satisfied the weighing procedure.
Only then can the Stewards authorise the announcement:
“Weighed in.”
It is racing’s quiet little full stop.
A few seconds over a loudspeaker, perhaps barely noticed by thousands of people around the course, marking the end of a process designed to ensure that what happened out on the track stands officially.
I’ve heard it countless times.
Next time, I think I’ll listen a little more closely.
FROM
The Canoe That Tells You Who Won
By Race Day Co Team
There are plenty of things you expect to find in the middle of a famous racecourse.
A winning post. Starting gates. Horses.
Perhaps not a canoe.
But at Saratoga Race Course in New York, a brightly painted canoe floating peacefully on the infield lake has become one of American racing’s loveliest traditions.
And it tells a story.
The Travers Stakes, Saratoga’s great race for three-year-olds, was first run in 1864. That makes it three years older than the Belmont Stakes and more than a decade older than the Kentucky Derby.
Yet somewhere along the way, a rather less serious tradition joined the history books.
Canoes were being mentioned in Saratoga’s infield as far back as the 1920s. There was even an old tale that an unlucky punter might need one to get home after losing his money at the races. Nobody seems entirely certain where that story began.
Then came the idea that stuck.
In 1962, the canoe appeared painted in the racing colours of Calumet Farm, whose Beau Prince had won the previous year’s Travers.
From then on, the tradition continued.
Each year the canoe is repainted in the colours of the owner of the latest Travers winner and placed back on the lake for the following Saratoga season.
There was even a problem in 2012.
The Travers finished in a dead heat between Alpha and Golden Ticket.
So what do you do when there are two winners and only one canoe?
Saratoga found the obvious solution.
They put two canoes in the lake. 😂
It’s hardly the most important tradition in world racing.
Perhaps that’s exactly why I like it.
For more than sixty years, one little boat has quietly told racegoers who conquered the Travers the year before.
No giant honour board required.
Just look for the canoe. 🛶🏇
FROM
The Colours Above the Crowd
By Tommy
Years ago, I was lucky enough to find myself at a race meeting in Japan while on holiday.
Naturally, I was watching the horses.
But after a couple of races, something else caught my eye.
The jockeys’ caps.
White. Black. Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. Orange. Pink.
Now back home in Australia, if an owner has more than one runner in a race wearing the same racing colours, we’re accustomed to seeing a change to the cap to help distinguish one horse from another.
So that’s what I assumed I was looking at.
I wasn’t.
Someone beside me explained that in Japanese racing the cap colour can identify the horse’s bracket, or waku.
There are eight bracket colours: white for one, black for two, red for three, blue for four, yellow for five, green for six, orange for seven and pink for eight.
In a big field, two horses may share the same bracket and therefore the same cap colour, even though they have different saddlecloth numbers.
Suddenly I understood what I was seeing.
Those bright caps weren’t simply decoration. They were helping thousands of racegoers follow their horses as the field swept around the track.
And this wasn’t some clever idea dreamed up for modern television.
Japan introduced the coloured-cap system in 1957.
For almost 70 years, Japanese racegoers have been watching those flashes of colour moving through a field.
I’ve watched Japanese racing many times since that holiday.
But now I don’t just watch the numbers.
I watch the caps.
And now that you know what they mean, I reckon you’ll never watch a race from Japan again without noticing them too.
Sometimes the smallest differences in racing tell you the most about how another country sees the sport.
