It reminded me of the time when I was a child and played horse racing/betting games on the spectrum with my family. Training your horse and rooting for it to come first as you watched it run across the screen. Good memories!
A few things I would have liked to have seen. Information about the different strategies the rival horses used before each race. Things like: first, front, back, tail. None of these strategies are ones you can pick for your own horse. Not that I can see anyway.
The other things that would have been good to see was your horse in the line up before the race where the stats for each horse is shown so that you can easily compare, and for the rival horses to have different stats from each other. From all of the races I saw it seemed like all of the rivals had the same stats.
Sadly my horse which always had better stats than the rival horses would never come first