The Nice Folks At The Track

When I first got into horse racing in our area in the mid-eighties there were a lot of blockheads and basic jack asses on the backstretch. And, this would be human asses instead of horses, mean, stupid people with multiple personality problems--not everybody, but, enough of them to make you uncomfortable.

I spent a little time in my early years wondering what sort of person would hire what I was seeing to train animals, and how some of these owners possibly would survive in the sport. With the advent of the three new midwest tracks in Des Moines, KC, and Oklahoma City, we were getting people on the backstretch who viewed horses as a commodity and racing as something to be exploited.

As the years passed indeed most of these sorts were evicted from the game, some forcibly, some went broke, and others just quit for one reason or other. I got a pretty good laugh a year ago when rich oilman former big shot and Oaklawn Park trainer Mr. X was denied his 20 stalls because he'd finally gotten under the skin of even the management, and was then relegated beside me to the ship in barn.

By the mid-nineties I began to notice a change in the atmosphere at our tracks. All of the sudden, it seemed, more and more people were "nice". As more time passed just about everybody you'd meet was that way.

I remember my seminal moment in this at Lincoln State Fair Racetrack in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1999. I was noticing all of the trainers and owners and track people, men and women, were the nicest, kindest, most helpful people. Nobody could afford worker's comp, so the backstretch was becoming a family affair, with kids, uncles and everybody helping out. People were visibily hanging together in this tough sport.

My time in Lincoln was such a sharp transition for me from the basic AHs I'd run into at the Kentucky Horse Center in Lexington the year before. And, to my pleasant surprise, the Lincoln experience was as we transitioned into the 2000s becoming the rule at all the tracks in our area. I was and still am able to talk definitively about the nice folks at the track.

Now, I'm sure any reader is asking, what is the point here? Well......the blog is about to get down to the business of relating injuries to training, which sina qua non relates injuries to trainers. Since a trainer or two occasionally stumbles on here, before starting out on this somewhat delicate subject, I'm sincerely hopeful that discussing training and it's affect on injuries, which is the substance and central element of our sport, can be done professionally without impugning anyone's integrity. I've posted here what I think about the people I'll be writing about, and everyone's methods are up for discussion, including my own.

Today's training: to be posted--i'm checking the forcast...omg.
Today's training: The farm is under water. putting the best face on the state of affairs-- rain 4 days out of 7: the wind is blowing hard enough to dry it out.