About

Horse Racing Datasets launched in 2015 as an easy way to share and find useable horse racing data.

We’ve been interested in horse racing datasets, and their unfortunate lack of availability, for some time. It’s a time-honored tradition for horseplayers to compile datasets for personal use, but it’s less common for them to share those datasets. —Raceday 360

We started with 10 datasets and are currently at 69 at the launch of this redesign. We gave the site a major update in 2019 that added new categories and the ability view datasets by category. This version aims to build on those improvements by increasing speed, usability and accessibility of the site.

• The site is now created with Eleventy, a static site generator, which means the site is now very fast. See the colophon for a full list of what was used to build this site.
• There is now pagination on the All Datasets listing to make navigating the growing list easier.
• Each dataset now has its own page to make sharing easier.
• Links now have visible focus states.
• There is a light and dark mode that respects the visitor’s system level preference. We have plans to add a toggle to allow for more flexibility.
• Color contrast in both light and dark modes meets WCAG AA standards.
• There are no screen reflow issues up to 500% zoom.
• The site is fully functional if JavaScript disabled or fails to load.

We’ve tested the site using VoiceOver on Mac but have not tested other screen readers or assistive technology. If you encounter any accessibility issues please contact us and we’ll do our best to quickly address your issue.

We’ll continue to add datasets as we find them, and you can always suggest a dataset for inclusion by using our submission form.

Our only current criteria, aside from being a dataset about Thoroughbred horse racing, is that the dataset should be in one of the following formats:

• Google Sheet
• CSV
• XSLX
• Spreadsheet at Dropbox
• A raw data format at Github
• Available via API

If you have local CSV or XSLX files you’d like to share, please consider hosting them via Google Drive, Dropbox or Github.

The site is designed, built, maintained and conceived by Dana Byerly. The idea for the site arose from a longstanding annoyance with the lack of usable horse racing data and many discussions with Jessica Chapel, who has served as an invaluable sounding board, reviewer of designs and friend of the project!