I think you missed that the whole point of this race was:
"did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?"
Which matters a lot when horses are the fastest land vehicle available. (We're so used to thinking of horses as a quaint and slow mean of transport that maybe we don't realize that for millennia they've been the fastest possible way to get from one place to another.)
> "did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?"
Yeah fair. There's also that famous human vs horse race that happens every few years. So far humans keep winning (because it's long distance)
If you're talking about the Man versus Horse Marathon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon) it's the other way around. Overwhelmingly the horses win. Only occasionally does the human.
I stand corrected. My memory garbled that. Thanks!