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The Gumball 3000 is more media spectacle than athletic competition, with celebrities and wannabes with more money than sense touring the country in expensive toys better suited as side-show attractions than in professional sport. That being said, I can only imagine the thrill, the rush these contestants and their die-hard followers must get from the event.

The rally is – I won’t say grueling – three thousand mile international road race where winning is merely a coincidence; being there is the prize.

First founded in 1999 by English entrepreneur Maximillion Cooper, The event is reminiscent of the ‘80s movie ‘Cannonball Run’, but there’s no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow; the prize is the attention, the true motivation is anyone’s guess. It draws the attention of many of the ‘beautiful people’; what we used to call the jet set – in my mind’s eye I can see a marvelously tanned George Hamilton, his gleaming smile and his silken scarf whipping in the wind over the back of his Bugatti.

Mostly run in Europe, the race has run all over the world, including a visit to North Korea in 2008. This year, the thirteenth annual Gumball 3000 was held May 25th to the 31st on the North American continent, primarily coast-to-coast through the United States, with a brief jaunt near the beginning into Canada to Toronto. The maximum 120-driver field took the green flag in Times Square at noon, and the checkered flag on Hollywood Boulevard seven days later. To all but a few who won was not important. For most what mattered was to say that you were there, either as a participant or a witness, to what is arguably the most glamorous, glitzy automobile rally on earth. And oh, by the way, the winners were Charles and Kira Morgan, in their 2012 Morgan Threewheeler. As far as I can tell, neither George Hamilton, Burt Reynolds, nor the late, great comedic talent Dom DeLuise attended.

How to breed a racehorse is a question that has been around for centuries! Breeding a thoroughbred is easy, but racing horses, now that is quite a different thing. Just as betting on a race is a gamble, so is running the gauntlet of picking the right sire and dam who might produce the next elusive, legendary racehorse. Many theories have been written on how to breed a champion varying from careful and statistical analyses, guess work, luck and superstition.

An old book many years ago was what first took my interest in the racehorse; it was about the Godolphin Arabian, one of the three founder stallions of today’s race horses. It’s self an intriguing story which also highlights how difficult it is to predict what will breed a champion.

When we look back at the bloodlines of the modern thoroughbred we find three stallions, the aforementioned Godolphin Arabian, the Burley Turk and the Darley Arabian these are said to be the founding stallions of today’s racehorses. However, other people believe it is through the dam line that the winning gene’s are carried.

The best way to trace the bloodline is through the distaff or female line, dating to the beginning of the General Stud Book (GSB). Sheer practicalities promoted this as mares produce far fewer foals than a stallion. Therefore thoroughbred stud books throughout the world trace ancestry through the maternal line and not the parental line.
And let us not forget that the racehorse is but one type of racing horse. Let’s not forget the trotters, pacers, Arabians, Mongolian ponies and the flapping ponies to name but a few. The trotting horse is bred to develop a specific gait where diagonal pairs of legs move at the same time with a moment of suspension between each beat the best tend to show this as their natural gait and the same is true of pacers. But when breeding to win, we look not only the performance of both the sire and dam, but at their pedigree as well. Most societies have blood stock records from which you can study bloodlines and with the internet to hand it is relativity easy these days to find a performance record of your desired potential parents. But even when you pair the perfect match as in anything to do with racing you must still run the gambit, the birth, the training, illness, injury and the final result.

But one can only dream of breeding the perfect horse and it is this that keeps the true horse lover going. To breed a racing horse, we pair the best and just pray for the rest.