Designed as a mirror for England’s Sandown Park, Dublin’s Leopardstown Racecourse is heading for its 14th decade in the sun. It was founded during the reign of Queen Victoria in 1888. This extended history, both of racing and its venues, belies the fact that the sport has evolved from a simple battle of hooves and grass to something excited by tech. Yet, can there be more to horse racing’s relationship with the internet than a place to bet?
Always-on
The sporting ‘experience’ has arguably shifted away from the pitch and track in recent years as people seek to engage with their favourite athletes all day long. What used to be a two-hour occasion once a week is now always-on, via apps and games. Developers aren’t above experimenting, either. The Slingo Racing game at Betfair is a three-way horse race between A Little Hoarse, Hairy Trotter, and Foal’s Gold. Each horse carries a prize.
Casino gaming often accompanies sports betting on operator sites, so it’s no surprise to see the sport make the leap to Slingo, a game that marries slot gameplay and bingo. The numbers for the bingo card come from the slot instead of a number caller in Slingo. Other, more traditional slots expand the sport’s canon. Big Racing offers a more subtle take on racing, featuring imagery of horses and jockeys to attract race fans.
Pretend Horses
Let’s change tack for a second. In the UK, mechanical horse racing has been a sideshow at seafront arcades for decades but, over the ocean in America, it had a large fanbase. A famous example is the Japanese creation Derby, by Sigma, in 1985. This game of jerky riders and their horses was beloved during the 90s and early 2000s. It now exists as a single machine at The D, Las Vegas. Atlas Obscura claims that versions with camels and chariots once existed, too.
These pretend horses bring us back to horse racing in the digital age. Sigma’s Derby and similar games are included in online casinos as virtual sports. The principle is the same – pick a jockey by name or their silks, here explained by the Jockey Club – but the mechanical parts are replaced by a 3D rendition of the race. Players wager on flat, jumps, and sprint races at tracks like Neighmarket, and all the horses have variable odds, with some as long as 28/1.
Web3.0 Concepts
New technologies always intrude upon the racing space. Recently, Web3.0 concepts like NFTs and the blockchain were briefly associated with racing. The idea is that people could ‘own’ digital horses that can be traded and bred, similar to how pets work in the blockchain game Axie Infinity. The problem is that NFT projects tend to have a short shelf life. The NFT marketplace for artwork fell in value from $2.9bn in 2021 to $23.8m in 2025, for example.
From a 140-year-old Leopardstown to a 3D horse race on a mobile phone (and everything in between), horse racing seems to have found new life – and a new face – in digital media.
