Warm Up Obstacles: Riders, Ponies and Horses

We'd ideally like our animals pre-race to perform a short gallop and then a couple of sprints sans pony, one on each lead. Last post I mentioned the physical limitations of this in terms of the position of the starting gate, the quickly diminishing warm up area caused by outriders perpetually starting their "roundup" prematurely, and general attitudes that prevail among the powers that be oblivious to the importance of pre-race warm ups.

For the enlightened trainer wanting to press on anyway, there's a lot more to overcome. Jerry Bailey in his book describes a scene half way across the world. It was the very first Dubai Cup. Sheik Mohammed invited Bill Mott, Cigar and (was it) the Paulson's, and everything went well for the American party except to Bailey's surprise ponies are barred at Nad El Sheeba. While this might indicate a certain enlightenment as to warming up by the Sheiks, Bailey fretted that he'd be unable to control the headstrong Cigar without a pony. Whatever the circumstances, they finally relented,Cigar got his pony and won the race by a couple of lengths, as I recall.

Of course you can understand Bailey's point. He may well have been unable to control Cigar, and the question becomes while RR in this blog can pontificate about ideal warm ups, unless we can get the horses to agree it's all much ado about nothing.

So the question, is it possible that but for the occasional pliable animal that we can get the run of the mill race horse to go out and perform our warm up routine like a trained poodle. I can relate from personal experience as a rider, for younger horses, doubtful, but, I'll limit that to the present state of things at our racetracks.

The manner in which our horses at the track are treated and trained--and by this I mean the psychological effect of 23 hour a day stalling combined with the get 'em out-get 'em back in exposure to the race track (as opposed e.g. to the hour a day Bill O'Gorman claims his horses got on the Newmarket track) makes an impossibly excitable animal in terms of any rational warm up schematic.

Yet, they perform these warm ups in Japan. How? There it's simply a little out of the box thinking and changing of the whole scene. The Jap pre-race warm up (in the race I saw) the horses were spaced without ponies some on the outside of the track, some on the inside, far enough apart that the jocks were able to go about their warm up business without fear of misbehavior or loosing their mounts. From the horse's point of view, it obviously can be done, because it is done in Japan.

I'll take a look at the role of our jocks and ponies in the warm up, next post.

Training:
It was bound to happen eventually as last night we had a collision between Nob and a "giant" grasshopper. This disaster occurred during an Aylward breeze with Nob at full bore and a grasshopper the size of a B-52 winging it straight into Nob's left eyeball. Bruised cornea, and Nob said just pre (violent) collision,the insect looked gigantic.

Al ran 4 x 2.4f last night (13.5s) but still get's winded despite all these breezes and thus looks increasingly problematical as a racing prospect. We'll see. Wind was off after his Tuesday Breeze.
Art: 9/13/07 Burch Day 3: With Nob's bruised eyeball all further riding was cancelled. Art performed 5 riderless 3/4 F sprints with gallops in and out with Acesmash. Both horses performed very energetically and looked good.