List Continued

Trainer of the 10 new two year olds has an overnight epiphany of being a "Charlie Whittingham" type trainer. Allusions/delusions of grandeur come to the fore with an entire shedrow of aspiring athletes. Next morning the trainer sets up the program and a problem develops immediately. The stable jock is nowhere to be found on the grounds. The stable exercise rider shows up at 8:15 a.m. during the break. An attempt at finding substitutes proves fruitless as it seems the whole backstretch is taking the day off. There are a few horses out on the track instead of many.

Riders as a problem--is the next item on "the list". First, are they available? Second, riders are never never interchangeable. Everybody knows that as meets open there are a jillion horses out there training and as the meet goes on this number becomes less and less and less until toward the end of the meet, except during the renovation breaks you see out there an occasional horse.

Does this happen because the trainers stop the training on whatever theories, or because all the riders are awol. My belief is that this phenomena developed over the years and in chicken-egg terms who knows which came first. End of meet are they without gallopers because all the riders sleep in or because even if riders were present most of our training yo yos would be declining to send horses out in any event. I'd think it's a little bit of both, and I did notice at the Woodlands in 2007--my last meet--that toward the end of the meet there were more horses out there than had been in former years--things changing a little, possibly.

The moral of the story is that training is controlled by riders, and anybody that has ever tried to train a horse at a race track over time understands riders as an enormous problem. If they're on track at all they're always galloping somebody else's horses, you wait for the interminably, and when they show up you're stuck with a cuppy beat up track. I'd say a ten horse stable in general likely has two available riders and during 50% of the meet but one of these is actually present, and there'll be a number of days when neither is on track.

And so, easy, you find a substitute. Not so fast! Assuming one can be found, this may prove the second sort of disaster for your horse. The rider you get will have a different weight, a different skill set and a different riding style than your horse is used to . In my experience substitute riders are disasters waiting to happen for your horse. I am extremely reluctant to use a substitute unless that rider is extremely light, or a jock. Jocks of course can ride, and they are safer, but you're just as likely to get the substitute jock who'se just going through the motions, never warms up the horse despite your instructions, fails to get the leads, is a few lbs heavier than your horse is used to etc. etc. The unknowledgeable person will fail to understand this stuff matters in terms of injuries. My stable has had several of its disasters happen when I felt compelled to use a substitute rider.

Can you get around the rider problem? I've always done it as I do everything at the race track--i.e. with $. I pay more, substantially more, and will generally be able to find somebody hungry with that method. That's been generally for 2 or 3 horses. Would suspect in a stable of 10 that riders at most tracks are a continuing and frequently intractable problem in putting together an intelligent program.

Training:
Sun 9/18 off.
Mon. 9/19: get there a little late and our galloper is found to have lost rear shoe in two days ago mud that I'd thought belonged to the other horse.. Our 3.5 inch nails that I have presently are insufficient for speed work in mud. Tack on shoe, work riderless with a nice wow workout, but too dark to continue. Plan gallop this eve.