Trotting: harness races in the pre-match line
On the 1xBet line, the Trotting section is where harness racing lives. The horse pulls a sulky, a light two-wheeled cart, and the person steering it is a driver sitting behind the animal rather than a jockey in the saddle. Two gaits are raced: a trotter's legs strike the ground in diagonal pairs, while a pacer swings the front and hind leg on the same side together.
Pacers, trotters and the mobile barrier
The section is named after the trot, yet a large share of what it lists is run at the pace. Pacers contest 80 to 90 per cent of Australian harness races. Most of those races start behind a mobile barrier, usually a car or utility vehicle fitted with two long arms; the field lines up behind it, the arms fold back and the horses are released.
Tracks you will find in the section
Every group in the line stands for one track on one race day. Its label names the country first and the venue second, and the figure in brackets tells you how many races are open for betting. Venues seen in the section include:
Australia: the Bathurst meeting, Redcliffe, Shepparton and Port Pirie;
USA: racing at Northfield Park and Yonkers Harness;
Canada: Western Fair.
Yonkers Raceway, in Yonkers, New York, is a half-mile dirt oval built for harness racing. It stages the Yonkers Trot, a signature race for three-year-old trotters, and the Messenger Stakes, run by pacers of the same age. Northfield Park sits in Ohio, close to Cleveland.
The groups shown follow the meetings on the calendar, so the set of tracks is rarely identical from one day to the next.
How a harness race is laid out in the line
Expand a group and each race gets a block of its own: start date and time, the track, then its slot on the card, Race 1, Race 2 and onwards. Underneath sit the runners, each with a number such as №3 and a name in capitals. Where a numeric price would normally appear, every horse just reads SP.
The market behind those blocks is "Winner, Starting Price". You back the horse you expect to reach the line first, and the bet is settled at the starting price, a figure that only takes shape once the race is off. The site's rule book has no chapter dedicated to harness racing; SP is defined in section 10.21, the horse racing section.
All other pre-match sports are gathered in the full 1xBet betting line.
Stakes go on in Moroccan dirhams (MAD) after you sign up for a 1xBet account.