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Harness racing is a form of horse racing in which the horses race at a specific gait (a trot or a pace). They usually pull a two-wheeled cart called a sulky , spider, or chariot occupied by a driver.
The diversium was unique to Byzantine chariot racing, a formal rematch between the winner and a loser, in which the competing charioteers drove each other's team and chariot. A winning charioteer could thus win twice over, driving the same horse team that he had defeated earlier, virtually eliminating mere chance or better horses as the ...
The word derives from the Latin quadrigae, a contraction of quadriiugae, from quadri-: four, and iugum: yoke. In Latin the word quadrigae is almost always used in the plural [1] and usually refers to the team of four horses rather than the chariot they pull. [2] In Greek, a four-horse chariot was known as τέθριππον téthrippon. [3]
The chariot for a two-horse racing team is not thought to differ otherwise from that drawn by a four-horse team, and so the horses of a biga pulled 50 kg each, while those of the quadriga pulled 25 kg each. [20] The models or statuettes of bigae were art objects, toys, or collector's items.
A two-horse chariot, or the two-horse team pulling it, was a biga, from biugi. A popular legend that has been around since at least 1937 traces the origin of the 4 ft 8 + 1 ⁄ 2 in standard railroad gauge to Roman times, [ 59 ] suggesting that it was based on the distance between the ruts of rutted roads marked by chariot wheels dating from ...
Horses were domesticated circa 3500 BCE. Before that oxen were used. Historically, a wide variety of arrangements of horses and vehicles have been used, from chariot racing, which involved a small vehicle and four horses abreast, to horsecars or trollies, [note 1] which used two horses to pull a car that was used in cities before electric trams were developed.
By 648 BCE, both chariot and mounted horse racing events were part of the ancient Greek Olympics, [12] and were important in the other Panhellenic Games. Chariot racing was dangerous to both driver and horse, often leading to serious injury and even death. In the Roman Empire, chariot and mounted horse racing were major industries. [13]
It is derived from the ancient Greek hippodromos (Greek: ἱππόδρομος), a stadium for horse racing and chariot racing. The name is derived from the Greek words hippos (ἵππος; "horse") and dromos (δρόμος; "course"). The ancient Roman version, the circus, was similar to the Greek hippodrome.