The SO is on photo shoot on location in the wild and exotic Kruger. Hmmm. Always dangerous to leave a woman unsupervised for any length of time as there’s just no telling what will be left of the bandwidth when you get back!
Good Blogs
Some recent web wanderings took me to a fantastic site called the Retired Racehorse Blog (www.retiredracehorseblog.com). It is run by a spunky young girl called Natalie Keller Reinert and, as it says on the tin, it’s all about what Thoroughbreds do after racing (no, don’t worry, this is not another lecture on making sure your OTTHB goes to a good home).
The Retired Racehorse Training Project is another group of people working hard to raise awareness and increase demand for retired Thoroughbred race horses as pleasure and sport horses. They recently did a fun little exercise called The Retired Racehorse Training Project Trainer Challenge (try saying that 3 times fast!!) where they took 4 horses off the track, gave them to 4 competitive riders to produce for one month and then compared the results at the end (I really promise this isn’t going to turn into a lecture!!).
It has been great fun following both blogs and seeing just how fantastic Thoroughbreds are as a breed and how much potential they have to do just about anything, given the right amount of time, effort and work. Because they do get a bit taken for granted these days.
Ms Reinert writes “A sizeable portion of the equestrian community, expert and fluent in so many breeds and disciplines, doesn’t understand the very unique life and thought process of the racehorse. Moreover, retired Thoroughbred racehorses, which have dominated the … scene for so many years, have recently begun to feel the push from Warmbloods and cross-breds. Thoroughbreds are being categorized as “hot,” and “sensitive,” and “too much horse” for the average equestrian. They’re being marketed as “For Experienced Rider Only,” or “Great For Professional.” The rare quiet horse is being tagged as “Not a typical Thoroughbred!”.
Odd, as the bloodlines of my youth such as Jerez, Trocadero and Drum Beat produced some jolly good race horses that went on to become jolly good competitive horses as well. They hunted, jumped, played gymkhana and polo, looked pretty in the show ring, but were still tough enough to eat a cross country course for breakfast. You still come across them in the jumping and eventing worlds and Nicola Mohr does a beautiful job with her Thb, Sportschu in the dressage arena. We know that some end up pulling township carts, Gill Olmesdahl of the Coastal Horse Care Unit says that they come across THB’s from time to time in their rural outreach days and it’s incredible to see that no matter where you put a Thoroughbred, it somehow manages to survive.
Handsome Is As Handsome Does
I was mulling all these thoughts as I wandered around the Kenilworth grounds over the weekend, looking into odd boxes and generally poking my nose into other people’s business. Here were 400 horses, not quite foals anymore, but not yet adults. Stuck in their ungainly, not quite yet beautiful bodies, far from the farms they’d grown up on. Some frightened, some frantic, others just quietly getting on with things. There were big ones, little ones, calm ones and wildly distressed ones. A friendly passer-by asked what I was looking for – I answered, I’ll know when I find it!
While the weekend’s sales marked the end of the journey for the breeders and stud staff, it was also the beginning of the journey for new owners and prospective trainers. And it’s fun and exciting from both angles. The breeders have invested the best part of 3 years in each foal and now pass the baton into new hands to see whether the horse’s competitive abilities live up to its bloodlines. Those babies hold so much promise and so much potential.
How does one choose?
The books will tell you that there’s no such thing as a perfect horse and every buyer has their list of requirements, nice to haves, and absolutes that simply can’t be compromised. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We all look at an individual and see something entirely different. What is an unacceptable flaw to one person, might be a manageable issue for someone else. And thank goodness for that, or we may never have had the likes of J J The Jet Plane! And yet, each has its own appeal. Even if the catalogue page leaves you cold, it’s hard to walk away from those hopeful, trusting eyes begging for just one more minute of your time.
One person remarked that they much preferred a horse that had been through a sale – ‘Been handled, seen a bit more of the world. Much more sensible than something off the farm’, came the assessment.
And they were right. All around us babies were banging on stable walls, or giving their handlers a hard time from the sales ring to the stables, but generally they were managing. And it’s a real credit to their resilience and toughness that they do as well as they do. Because this is merely the start of the journey.
These babies will have been loaded onto floats and be most of the way to their new destinations by the time you read this. Soon it will be time for a saddle, bridle and rider and off to the race track. They will be carted from pillar to post – some clocking up more miles than the average corporate traveller. They will have to cope with an ever changing string of grooms, work riders and jockeys, different race tracks and different distances. By the time next year’s yearling sales roll round, these youngsters will already have forgotten more than most of us will ever see.
Quite incredible.
What’s On The Page
We know so much about them from their catalogue page, and yet, we know nothing about them at all. We can guess and speculate, but the end of the day, we have to wait for them to hit the track to find out what they really are.
So what is a young Thoroughbred really? Looking at those babies on Sunday, one hopes and wishes they can all be champions, but the real answer is that they might be just about anything!
Journeymen
There are a numbers of ways to consider a journey. Usually we view it with trepidation from the threshold, take time for a quick break at about the half way mark to see how far we’ve come and build some courage for the next bit and then at the finish we can view the completed journey from beginning to end.
For those having to say goodbye (with no doubt equal amounts of regret and relief!), I hope your youngsters will go out into the world and do you proud. For those who are holding sales slips with that weird, stomach churning feeling you get at the top of a roller-coaster, I hope you have bought well and wish you much fun and excitement on your adventure. For those who have had to take youngsters back to the farm and are back at the drawing board trying to map a way forward, I wish you courage and resilience. They do say one often takes the best ones home.
I’ll leave you with one last thought from Natalie Keller Reinert – “All the promise and power that is a Thoroughbred, you can see in the yearling. Their wildness is still present, although they are ready to be put to saddle and bridle. They are half-tamed, they are children, they are athletes, they want you to comfort them and they want to bite you. The more time that I spent with them, the more I came to love the yearlings best. Love, love, love. Love is a many-splendored thing. Love is a racehorse”.
