My mentor and, I am privileged to be able to say friend, Kelly Marks is a great believer in living positively. And to do this successfully she recommends surrounding yourself with all the things you like, that make you happy or lift your mood – favourite photographs, songs that make you cheerful, anything that puts and keeps you in a positive frame of mind.
A group of my horsey friends has a running conversation under the heading ‘Today joy was brought to me in the form of’. Any time anyone has something extra specially good happen to them, we get to flag and share it. I think that’s a pretty good way to stay positive as well as to pay it forward by sharing it with your mates.
Brown paper packages tied up with string…
One of my favourite things is receiving packages through the post (I hope there are no al-Qaeda members in the readership!). With the excellent and reliable Royal Mail and a rather busy Amazon account, it was a vice I could indulge in regularly while living in the UK. The South African GPO is unfortunately a little less reliable, but I still manage the occasional book or item of tack. The frisson of excitement I get from a little slip of paper tucked in my daily mail is quite ridiculous, particularly when I know what the package contains anyway, but there you go.
So this week ‘joy was brought to me in the form of’ just such a receipt. My manservant was duly dispatched to the post office and returned triumphant with an excitingly bulky package. The SO frequently refers to my ever expanding collection of books, magazines and assorted paraphernalia as ‘horse porn’ and indeed my exciting new dressage DVD’s, while a much anticipated treat, are the sort of thing that one tends to watch furtively. In the privacy of your home. Usually on your own. So I can sort of see where the analogy comes from! The main prize, however, was a little more mainstream – a copy of Les Carlyon’s True Grit. Not only that, it is the revised and expanded version. REVISED AND EXPANDED! I quite literally dropped everything to go and read a few pages.
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
I was recently chatting to one of our prominent and rather more popular breeders about stallions, breeding trends and life in general and they made the observation that South Africans have a rather oddly inflated regard for things ‘from overseas’. Possibly because our political history and past international sanctions forced us to rely on locally produced, well, everything really, we seem to have an insatiable appetite for things from abroad. Whether they are in fact any better than what’s available locally is entirely irrelevant, it’s the fact that they are foreign that seems to hold the appeal.
I confess that I’m guilty of this. I love most things British. I love the sense of humour, the accent(s) and above all, their incredible knowledge and generosity in sharing it. It’s not necessarily that I think it is better than what we have locally, but one cannot argue that foreigners have different experiences, ideas and perspectives. And it’s not just different nationalities – different professions and age groups can be just as ‘foreign’. And therein lies the fascination as well as the potential for learning.
Most racing folks would have come across the veterinary practice of Baker McVeigh, spearheaded by the charismatic and highly recognizable Dr John McVeigh. Not only does he possess a Scottish accent and an unruly mop of hair, but a seemingly endless well of energy and insatiable appetite for research and knowledge.
It was therefore tremendously exciting to receive a notification of their recent Horses In Training evening and I lost no time in submitting my RSVP for the event held at the Cape Town practice last Thursday.
I joined an august assembly of prominent owners, trainers and breeders and we were treated to the most incredible evening. The event was presented in a sort of relay with Doctors John McVeigh, Dave Timpson, Alasdair Cameron, Camilla (Dilly) Nock and Emma Allsop taking turns to present on different areas of expertise and commonly encountered racing pathologies.
Food for Thought
An opening address by Dr McVeigh enlightened us on the importance of correct, balanced and individually tailored feeding of our foals and youngstock. His message was heavily underlined by statistics that over 80% of Group winners in the UK are homebreds, individually produced and raised and, perhaps most importantly, spared the rigors and stresses of intensive sales prep.
Inside Giants
Dr McVeigh and Dr Nock showed us the intricate workings inside a horse’s leg by dissecting some carefully prepared specimens. It was fascinating and illuminating to get an inside glimpse into the effects and results that the rigors of racing and training impose on these sophisticated structures and made frequently used phrases such as ‘core lesion’, remodeling, and stress fracture, tangible and easily understood.
Dr Emma Allsop took us on a journey of the respiratory tract and illustrated some of the commonly encountered issues that can lead to loss of performance. Her presentation also included an in-depth explanation of tie-backs and Hobdays (topical after Ebony Flyer’s successful procedure). Dr Cameron had fascinating footage of intra-articular surgery and a visual ‘Honey I Shrunk The Kids’-style tour inside a horse’s joints, while Dr Timpson covered a wide range of pathologies and their treatments in his presentation on ‘mystery lameness’.
As a racehorse owner, our trainers make so many of the on-the-spot management decisions about our animals and owners often only find out that our horse has seen a vet when we receive the bill! It is enormously encouraging to know that Baker McVeigh are not only dedicated and highly enthusiastic about the work that they do, but equally so about educating and informing the industry that they service. For that they get a huge thumbs up from me.
It was a thoroughly fascinating and illuminating evening and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Keep an eye on your invoices and statements for forthcoming fixtures and do whatever you have to to attend. You will not be sorry!
‘When the Almighty put hoofs on the wind and a bridle on the lightning, He called it a horse’
The Sizzling Summer Season has arrived in Cape Town in no uncertain terms with this week’s heat wave and severe weather warning. Fires have been raging all over the Cape and temperatures are blistering. Perhaps I’m being fanciful, but it feels as though the elements are making their contribution to the build-up to this weekend’s hotly (see what I did there?) anticipated Betting World Cape Flying Championship. It may only be a small field, but what a race it’s going to be!
Var, pronounced by Frankie Dettori as the fastest horse he’s ever ridden, sends out his daughter, the fabulous speedster Val de Ra. This champion filly is unbeaten in 7 starts over the five furlong trip. She seems to be burning up the turf even faster than her sire and being so stupendously fast, one is not quite sure she’s ever really been challenged over this distance. So the prospect of seeing her going head to head with the best of the colts is quite intoxicating.
What A Winter is an exceptionally handsome son of stalwart stallion Western Winter. Val de Ra might have bloodied his nose when they met over this trip at Turffontein last April, but What A Winter is only just growing into his lanky frame and coming into his own. He is a year younger than his rival, more impetuous and a little more comfortable in the joints since having some chips removed. He has already shown that he is in winning form on his last two outings and the match up of him against the filly is utterly thrilling. He put up a good grass gallop at Kenilworth last week, has the best of the draw, and if all goes according to plan the MBR team predict that he will be asked to fetch the filly at the death.
However, the real story of the day has simply got to be J J The Jet Plane. The little horse with the comic name, the big heart and the simply unstoppable grit and determination. He really is one of our most exciting and gut-wrenching horses. His international campaign is the stuff of dreams and legends and watching his win in the Cathay Pacific Sprint is guaranteed to raise goosebumps as well as a lump in the throat. Some horses, as some people, seem to have things easy, but not JJ. He has fought every step of the way, his most recent battle being a potentially career-ending injury.
This horse inspires the most incredible emotion, not to mention loyalty and devotion. We’ve all seen the incredible footage of his groom, Everisto Nyambo’s victory celebrations after his Cathay Pacific win, but he affects everyone who works with him. One of my favourite stories is of Bernard Fayd’herbe volunteering to spend 8 days as his groom while Everisto made an emergency trip to South Africa to renew his visa.
But JJ is back. Again. And with all signs of that lesion having vanished, he will cast an exceptionally long shadow in the parade ring on Saturday.
One of my favourite bits from Les Carlyon’s book reads as follows – ‘When horses, or those who ride or train them, do rare things, they make the people who were present that day feel good’.
Life is short and those moments that merit a mention on ‘Today Joy Was Brought To Me In The Form Of’ are few and far between. With the quite stupendous card of horses, trainers and riders on offer on Saturday I highly recommend a trip down to Kenilworth. I have a feeling we’re in for a heck of a ride.
