What It Means
This is not an eligibility condition. Where the rest of a Plainridge program prints a coded rule about who may enter, AMATEUR names a specific race or series that the office ran under its own title, which is why it reads as a word rather than as a string of letters and figures.
No expansion of the name is asserted here, because the programs print the title without explaining who or what it honoured. What can be stated is exactly how it was used, and that is set out below straight from the cards themselves.
In the programs held here AMATEUR was carded 20 times for the pace (19) and trot (1), carrying purses from $1,800 to $2,500. The first appearance in this record is Aug 7, 2004 and the last is Jul 11, 2013, which gives a rough sense of how long the racing office kept the condition in rotation.
A named race is worth tracking across seasons in a way an ordinary condition is not. It tells you which afternoons the office built its season around, and the horses that turned up for it are usually the best the meeting could attract that year.
Every Running in the Record
Questions about this condition
Was AMATEUR raced at the trot or the pace?
Both: pace (19) and trot (1). The figures are race counts, so the condition leaned pace here.
What did AMATEUR pay?
Purses of $1,800 to $2,500. Purse is the money on offer for the race, split by finishing position, and it is the most reliable indicator of where a condition sat relative to the rest of the card.
When did AMATEUR last appear on a card?
2013-07-11, having first appeared on 2004-08-07. Both dates come from the surviving documents for those days.
What is the AMATEUR?
A named race carded 20 times at Plainridge for $1,800 to $2,500, first on 2004-08-07 and last on 2013-07-11. Named races sit outside the ordinary condition ladder — the purse is the clearest signal of that.
How often was AMATEUR carded?
20 races in the recovered record, 2004-08-07 to 2013-07-11. That is a count of surviving charts and entry sheets, so it is a floor rather than a total.