One For The Road

Today’s athletic road horses, or roadsters, thrill crowds in the show ring with their flashy speed. But they also have a long, illustrious history that winds through show rings, raceways, and the country lanes traveled by 19th-century doctors and itinerant preachers.

By Kayce M. Bell

The muddy road deteriorated into a barely visible trail, the wintry night wind howling and the rain pouring in sideways sheets. The rural doctor pushed on, trusting his four-wheeled buggy to hold together and his road horse to get him to the ailing patient, whose family awaited the doctor’s arrival after nearly a full day’s travel. When he had tended to the patient — perhaps delivering a baby, setting a broken bone, or treating a contagious disease — the doctor wearily took the long reins from the buggy dashboard and gratefully praised the stamina and willingness of his horse to get them both home, again over the same rough terrain.

That scene may be fictional, but it's an entirely likely account of a road horse's critical role in helping doctors serve patients in early America. While road horses found favoritism in a society that relied on four-legged horsepower for transportation, today they are chosen for their ease of training, willingness to do what is requested of them, and stamina, qualities that derive from generations of Americans asking the roadster to take them home.

From their early use as trusted steeds for country doctors and itinerant preachers, road horses now excel not just on the harness racing track, but in the show ring, where they excite crowds and thrill onlookers with their speed and agility. Hooked to two-wheel carts (called bikes), four-wheeled wagons, or even under English tack, roadsters are rising in popularity as the horse-version of NASCAR. A growing group of aficionados — including women, older youths, amateurs, and professional drivers — barrel down the show ring’s straightaways and slide around the turns, demonstrating various speeds of the trot: the animated and brilliant jog and road gait upon entering the ring in clockwise direction, then the jog, road gait, and speed gait after the class of entries reverses. While the jog and road gait are smart and showy, it’s the speed gait — the one for which the announcer calls, “Drrrrrrriiiiiiiiiive on!” or even, “Go for the doctorrrrrrrrrr!” — that elicits the crowd’s verbal appreciation and the drivers’ biggest grins. Even at speed, a road horse must go in form, with straight and true action. The announcer often blows a whistle to slow things down, and the road horses dutifully trot to the line-up, ears pricked and leather lines relaxed.

“It’s electrifying to feel the lines when they call us to ‘go at speed.’ When you have a great lap, when the turn is fast and clean, and you come into the straightaway just stroking — that’s the best feeling. There really isn’t anything like it!” said Ali DeGray, of Tampa, Fla., describing her experience in the bike with Kentucky State Fair World’s Champion of Champions Game Changer.

Although current show ring conditions are much superior to the miles of nearly impassable paths that roadsters were once expected to navigate at speed, it’s the road horses’ same trainability and stamina, pleasant attitude, attractive appearance, and suitability that keep them relevant to today’s equine enthusiasts.

The Long Road to the Show Ring

Pointing to the years after the Civil War as the origins of the road horse, leading historian and roadster enthusiast Larry Jenkins of Suwanee, Ga., referred to the more than 1 million horses and mules that perished in service on both sides of the conflict, which ended in 1865. Soon after, wealthy Americans began filling their barns with road horses to be used for both transportation and sport.

“Some of the sportier trotters would be hooked and driven with great pride by men of families with surnames such as Vanderbilt, Bonner, and Stanford,” Jenkins said.
As automobiles took over transportation, harness racing and showing gained popularity, both on tracks and town roads. Many towns still have roads named Race Street, because that was the designated place for a planned or impromptu roadster contest. Standardbreds — horses that could trot or pace a mile in the standard of 2.5 minutes or less — were especially popular entries, tracing back to bloodlines gathered from Norfolk Roadster/Hackney, native North American trotting/pacing varieties, Thoroughbred, and Morgan horses. Able to trot at 30 mph, Standardbreds quickly became known for besting other horses’ top trotting speed of 10-12 miles per hour.

" When I'm driving a roadster, I feel like I can fly" - driver Judy McNeish

“The earliest mention of a roadster winning a world’s championship was Glenbrook in 1902, in Louisville, Ky.,” Jenkins, said as he pointed to official records of the Kentucky State Fair World’s Championship Horse Show, which takes place in Louisville.

The sporty and durable horses weren’t the exclusive domain of the wealthy, however.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, you could go to most small towns and there would be a big crowd to watch the roadster horses at a show,” Jenkins recalled of his younger years in the Atlanta, Ga., area. (Jenkins' father, Carl, also drove roadsters.)

Trainers such as R.C. “Doc” Flanery — whose Illinois farm was where the trotting legend Greyhound lived out his post-racing days — David Neil, and Lloyd Teater were known for refining the horses and the show conditions, circumstances that later resulted in the appearance of women drivers, amateur drivers, and even older teen-aged drivers and riders in the show ring. Teater campaigned the horse Bombsight, said to have won more than 250 classes at horse shows.

“Bombsight was the fastest in the ring on the straightaways,” said Raymond Shively, 85, of Danville, Ky., who was dubbed by horse show announcer Peter Doubleday as The Master of Faster. “But you could catch him in the turns. As soon as he came out of the turn, he was gone again.”

Pretty and Powerful

Shively’s first go in the road bike was at the Tennessee State Fair, when he was 18 or 19 years old. He remembers a packed class of roadsters in the ring.

In the last few decades, Shively has “owned the roadster division,” according to Jenkins. Shively sped his way to the winner’s circle of the Kentucky State Fair World’s Championship Horse Show Roadster to Bike Championship an incredible 23 times since 1982, with horses that quickly found their way into the fondest memories of onlookers: NonStop, The Natural, When & Where, Power Ranger, Invincible Summer, Big Red, and the aptly named six-time winner Emerson (after Shively’s roadster friend Emerson Wallingford).

Shively shared his thoughts about the changes he’s seen in the roadster show world since the days of a rowdier set of drivers. “The horses are nicer, the show conditions are much improved, and the announcers do a great job of helping everyone stay safe. And, most importantly, the trainers are teaching safety first to their drivers,” he said. “It’s about the quality of the gaits and the quality of the horse — not just the speed — just like it’s written in the USEF Rulebook. People shouldn’t have to worry about safety when they go in the show ring.”

There’s an art to transforming a race horse to a show horse, and Shively is credited as holding an important paintbrush. “First thing a roadster horse has to be is pretty. He’s gotta be high-headed. And how he moves off of his back end — the way he puts his rear leg up under him — is so important,” he explained. “The Natural ("Nat") couldn’t step over a corncob when I got him, but, boy, could he work from behind.”

Nat, the horse that remains fabled in any roadster discussion, won the bike stake at Louisville’s World’s Championship Horse Show three times with Raymond at the lines, and twice more with amateur owner Shane Chancellor as driver. (The Natural continued to win under Kim Crumpler’s stable banner.)

The worst mistake one could make with a roadster is to work them too long, too hard, or too often in show tack, Shively stated. “It’s all in the attitude to make good show horses. If you can get the roadster to walk and relax, then you can do a lot of things with him. I let them put their heads down and jog around the track, consistently. Just stay on the rail. Take that energy a roadster has and channel it in the right way, and you’ll have a safe, fast, and showy horse to enjoy.”

New Traditions

The Master of Faster’s record at setting new benchmarks supports his comments. Judy McNeish of Denver, Colo., who has driven under Shively’s tutelage for 37 years, was the first woman to win a World’s Champion of Champions title driving a four-wheeled wagon to a roadster in competition.

“Raymond was concerned that it wouldn’t look ladylike, back then, for me to hang my foot outside of the wagon, like the male drivers do for balance around the turns. So I braced my feet as gracefully as I could inside the wagon,” she said. “We didn’t want to give anyone a reason to think women couldn’t compete just as capably as the men drivers in a wagon class,” she said with a smile.

It obviously worked: McNeish has brought home a whopping 27 roadster blue ribbons from the World’s Championship Horse Show, many of them catch-drives for other owners. Her beloved Invincible Summer won two world’s grand

championships, three world’s champion of champions titles, and 10 world’s championships. “To our knowledge, Summer won the most victory passes at Louisville of any road horse, and he was 17 at his last win,” she said, adding, “When I’m driving a roadster, I feel like I can fly.”

Before McNeish burst through the gate, Audrey Pugh Gutridge was the woman who pierced the glass ceiling of the male-dominated sport, even driving the legendary Bombsight at a show or two in the early ’60s. “At Louisville, the guys were grumbling, ‘Yeah, we’ll have to watch out for her [in the show ring],’” chuckled Shirley Simcox Parkinson of Decatur, Ill.

At 92, Parkinson has watched “lots of experimentation and refinement occur” in the roadster ranks, such as wider road bikes, more patent leather and more brass fittings on the show harness, and even breeding expansion that includes American Saddlebreds, Dutch Harness Horses, or Morgan horses represented in the pedigrees (although most roadsters are full or half-Standardbred or full or half-Hackney pony). However, it wasn’t until 1994, when a female driver, Marilyn Macfarlane with Shining Brightly, first won the roadster world’s grand championship, “the bike stake."

Roadster Ponies

It wasn’t just women who were looking to fly. As early as the 1940s, youngsters were putting on the racing silks and heading for the in-gate, most often, behind roadster ponies.

“Back then, Shetlands were used as often as anything else for kids’ roadsters,” said Parkinson. “Then the Hackney ponies arrived on the scene, and that changed everything. The adults wanted to show them, too!”

“It’s electrifying.…There really isn’t anything like it!” - driver Ali DeGray

Juvenile exhibitors are eligible to ride Hackney roadster ponies in competition — which Parkinson likens to “riding a greased pig” — while the adults are relegated to driving them to bikes, but that doesn’t seem to be a deterrent. After show ring officials, owners, and trainers figured out how to better prepare a Hackney pony for under-saddle or bike classes, the sport again became tamer, Parkinson reported. Hackney pony roadster classes are now among the most populated at horse shows, and younger exhibitors seem especially well-matched in their teams. There’s apparently something about those racing silks, fashioned in bright farm colors with contrasting trim, that brings out the most competitive edge in exhibitors of any age.

“Roadster show exhibitors adopted the silks from the harness racing track,” Jenkins said. “We wear jacket lengths to below the waist and soft caps as head gear [juvenile exhibitors are required to wear approved helmets]. When you get your silks made, you’re making a big statement about tradition and what makes you unique as an exhibitor. It’s easy to identify a roadster exhibitor in the ring by the silks they’re wearing.”

Not all roadster exhibitors wear silks, however. The roadster-to-wagon classes typically find the drivers wearing business

attire, including the obligatory hat. In the once-popular wagon appointments class, the driver parked the horse at the line-up and a helper displayed their appointments kit on the back of the wagon, a latched, wooden box containing tools and replacement items to get the rig back on the road in case of a breakdown.

“The horses had to be well-mannered enough to stand through that whole, lengthy, line-up process,” Parkinson said, “Just as they would if they were stranded on the roadside.” Judges were responsible for proving all necessary items were present, including the silver flask that contained bracing libations in case the driver, or his passenger, needed a little medicinal help. “I always put Jack Daniel’s in my flask,” said Shively. “Back when there were 16 or 19 wagon horses in the line-up, that must’ve been a popular time to be a judge!”

And then there’s the discussion of preferred show rings or tracks. Just ask any roadster exhibitor about their favorite: Illinois State Fairgrounds, Harrodsburg, Ky., Lawrenceburg, Ky., or even the Red Mile? Opinions are divided as cleanly as the three variations of the trot should be, and the conversation will be as spirited as the ones to determine whether Doc Flanery’s Senator Crawford was better than Lloyd Teater’s Bombsight.

This you can depend on, though: when the bugle sounds for the gate to open for the roadster class, everyone in the audience leans forward in their seats. You just can’t help it when the roadsters hit the ring. The excitement is about to begin!

Photos; Doug Shiflet Photography by Rachel, Howard Schatzberg, Jane Jacobs, and The Harness Racing Museum & Hall of Fame, Goshen, N.Y.