The darker side of a sedate sport

“There are more horses than cows in the Balearics. We have the greatest number of horses per square kilometer in all of Europe. Breeding them is our trade, and harness racing is our tradition.”

The speaker is Joan Llabata, a quiet but passionate horseman, who presides the Balearics Harness Racing Federation. He himself has five trotters racing for his stable, Llevant, which is named after his small business.

This type of racing, in which horses pull a lightweight, two-wheeled cart — known as a sulky — at a fast trot, rather than galloping under a jockey, has been practiced for hundreds of years in the Balearic Islands. It was born out of the old competitions between peasant farmers on their way to Sunday Mass, when they would challenge each other to a race on their carts, which were pulled along by their workhorses.

One of the animal's owners

But today these races are somewhat of a peculiarity in Spain, and they occasionally show their darker side. On December 30, a horse was beaten to death back at the stables after a race at Manacor Raceway, located on the east of Palma de Mallorca island. One of its owners beat the animal to death with a lead bar after it fell out of step and broke into a gallop, rather than remaining at a trot, which meant disqualification.

The equine ended up dying of a broken skull, simply for having lost a race in which first prize was 250 euros, and the amount of money bet on it 300 euros.“It was an isolated, reprehensible case, an act of savagery that has been magnified,” says Llabata.

Francesc Bujosa, a university professor who owns trotters, says that “the worst part about the deadly attack on the horse is the attempt to cover it up. It is sad and morally unjustifiable to beat a defenseless animal,” he says.

The attacker, a 38-year-old truck driver, is being charged with animal abuse. A spokesman for the Civil Guard talks about the act as if it were a crime of passion: “The man says that he had no intention of killing the animal, and the truth is he is quite sorry about what happened and has cooperated fully with our inquiries.”

In the past, when competition knew no limits, there were drivers who fought out a race by whipping their horses. But these days, the excessive use of the whip is sanctioned.

“We have more anti-doping checks than anybody else,” notes Llabata. Two horses died some years ago just a few hours after winning the top prize. And in another dark chapter in Mallorcan harness-racing history, a big-shot owner once walked into his stables to find a severed horse’s head, placed there by hired thugs as an act of revenge over failed love affairs and business ventures.

Half of the 15,000 racehorses on Mallorca have been trained for trotter racing

In this island microcosm, there are 150 days of harness racing a year. Of the 15,000 racehorses on Mallorca, half have been trained to compete at the trot, not the gallop, while pulling a sulky and its driver. There is no social pomp at the raceway, but it does bring out millionaires.

A successful trotter can cost up to 100,000 euros, and a dose of its semen goes for as much as 30,000 euros. There are high-end owners, such as the former banker who built himself a personal raceway with posh stalls; there are horse-owners from medium-sized businesses, and there are families and associations who share ownership of a single horse.

There is a certain amount of power and vanity, and quite a bit of money, flowing through the world of harness racing. There are retired politicians with remarkable stables, such as the Socialist architect Pere Serra, or the engineer and former Popular Party leader Juan Verger. There was a time when harness racing was the realm of smugglers and landowners — even of drug traffickers. But now, the nouveaux riches and the hotel owners (half-a-dozen of them) rule the racecourses.

It is a passion that knows no borders. There is harness racing across nearly the entire European Union, and hundreds of Mallorcans have a bank account in France just so they can subscribe to Canal+ and access a sports channel called Equidia, which only shows horse racing. The French gambling company PMU sets up competitions in Mallorca, and hundreds of thousands of euros in bets are made online.

This world was once a cash haven for a drug ring, which eventually had 10 trotters seized by the authorities. The money from heroin and cocaine sales was being laundered there, but one of the ring’s trotters won a major prize and the photograph in the winner’s circle became a headache for the authorities. The owners eventually went to jail.

“It’s just another anecdote that does not darken a very pure thing,” says Ramón, a racing fan.

Among the public that regularly turns out at the five raceways in the Balearic Islands, there are many whose faces have been made leathery by the rural sun. Hundreds of families raise and own horses who graze and amble in the varying landscape of inner Mallorca, home to an ancient and multiclass society.

“I got into debt buying hay,” jokes the musician Joan Bibiloni, who lives near his 10 horses. He once had 24, and confesses that he was self-financed, but that “you never make enough to go live in the Caribbean for seven weeks.”

Bibiloni’s trotters are named after his own passions: Ava Gardner, Frank Zappa, Debussy, Janis Joplin and Caixeta, the latter being his mother’s nickname.

“Sensitivity rules the breeding, the training and the racing [of trotters]. It’s a marvelous thing, but a contemptible, violent incident has occurred affecting individual morality; yet it is a fringe occurrence,” he says, in reference to the recent deadly attack.

A legendary sulky driver, the deceased Julià Arnau, loved his animals and used to say: “I would only trade horses for an opera.” Julià used to recount the miseries, glories and dark secrets of an atavistic world.

“It is the most classical and ancient of sports, the chariot racing in Ben-Hur, the sport of Greek culture,” notes Professor Bujosa, who says that watching his horse win affords him an “indescribable joy, the excitement of a soccer player.” On his website, Bujosa sells shares in his equine promises.

With a stable of 40 horses, the hotel and art gallery owner Juan A. Horrach Moyá explains that “driving in such a brief and intense race is a brutal physical experience — an exercise in freedom, closeness and trust with the animal.”

This is not a business, we're just trying to break even. It's a passion"

Horrach Moyá races trotters like his father and uncle did before him, and his son is already racing with ponies.

“It is the island sport par excellence,” says Horrach Moyá. “It has deep roots among the peasantry that knows the breeding techniques.”

It used to be that trotters were imported, but now the best ones are flown out to foreign raceways to compete for big prizes. A selection of horses travels by plane from France to Mallorca every year to compete in Palma for just one day.

“We can run head to head with anybody, we are very competitive,” says Horrach. “This is not a business, we’re just trying to break even. It’s ruinous. It’s a passion.”