Page 22 - The Game September 2006
P. 22

22 The Game, September 2006 Hotwalker’s Blues
by evenSteven
Even before Hastings Park opened for the season I was already tired of walking hots. I came to the racetrack four years ago with the sole intention of riding, but making inroads proved more difficult than I’d imagined. Despite an oft-mentioned chronic shortage of good help, nobody seemed very willing to give a new guy a chance. For the past three seasons I walked hots and watched with envy the other exercise riders go galloping past the gap. Fortunately for me, a rider named Cenek Kottnaur introduced himself and invited me to coming riding with him at the farm. Months later, thanks to Cenek’s and Sean William’s ongoing tutelage, I consider myself a lucky man indeed to be getting paid to ride racehorses for a living.
I first heard about Hastings Park five years ago during a regrettable two month stint as a telephone surveyor. My last day of work I surveyed a woman who worked
Your Thoroughbred Racing Community Newspaper
For more information contact
Ron Clarkson, Rolling Ridge Farm
at Hastings Park for her father, a long time horse-trainer. I forgot all about the survey and we talked about the racetrack instead. Fortunately my employer was listening in and I was fired for deviating from the survey script to discuss "Personal Interests" on the company dime. I wish I could remember the name of the woman I surveyed that day. I’d like to thank her for my recent change in careers.
I spent much of my childhood on horse- back. For years Mom drove us kids to weekly riding lessons. By the time I was eight I always had a horse of my own and spent long hours on cross-country hack-a- bouts searching in vain for a fox to pursue. But the thrill of the hunt was a pale day- dream compared to my burning desire to be a jockey. I recited famous racehorse statistics the way other kids spit batting averages. I read every book ever written by Walter Farley. I made a rough track in a nearby pasture and galloped my quarter
horse around and around, terrorizing the neighbour’s sheep and cattle. My riding instructors were forever exasperated with the length of my stirrups, which I shortened ‘til I crouched like a bug on the back of my horse.
As a kid I spent the best years of my life on horseback. I returned to Hastings Park this season wanting to realize my dream of riding racehorses for a living. But I soon learned exercise riding is a much more extreme style of equestrianism than anything I’d ever done. If you equate your average weekend rider to your average weekend canoeist, exercising racehorses is comparable to the weekend canoeist deciding to suddenly tackle class 5 white- water. No matter how much riding experience you have, you just don’t start out by riding horses at the track. I lucked with two of the best gallop boys at Hastings Park taking me under their wing. Turns out I completely underestimated
how radically exercising racehorses differed from my previous riding experience. As a kid, I never had horses rear up and threaten to fall over backwards on me out of the starting gate. That was a first. As a kid I never had to worry about forty other horses all careening around the same 5/8 mile track at high speeds under varying degrees of control in all manner of weather. In fact, growing up on horseback in the Ottawa Valley, I never had to worry about most of the infinite possibilities I soon discovered every exercise rider contends with on a daily basis. Until I started doing it, I simply had no idea exercising racehorses ranked right up there with any extreme sport on the planet.
My most humbling experience to date has been having a horse run away with me. Although I’d already been warned that anybody who exercises thoroughbreds gets run away with from time to time, until this past month it had never happened to me.
Only since that day have I begun to understand the depth of the breeding of these animals. For hundreds of years, thoroughbreds have been bred to run the way a pitbull is bred to fight. Speed is encoded in their genes. They don’t know anything else but to go fast. Thoroughly-bred running machines. This revelation really sunk in one particular one morning as my horse and I pounded down the homestretch at a pace rapidly accelerating beyond my comfort zone. What began with the lines pressed firmly down into a tight cross on my horse’s neck began to unravel like rotten old twine. Determined not to budge an inch, I pulled and pressed my lines further down his neck, trying to bring his chin down into his chest. It looked so easy watching other riders do it, but some- thing wasn’t working. The harder I pulled, the faster my horse ran. Didn’t he know this was his signal to slow down? Worse yet, I could feel myself beginning to tire. With horrified fascination I felt my strength flow down my arms and out my fingers until suddenly I had no strength left. As we circled the track at what felt like a ridiculously high rate of speed, I stared at my balled up fists and willed them to remain attached to the lines. My arms felt like a pair of wet noodles flapping at my sides. My death grip on the lines felt like the only thing preventing the noodles from flapping right out of my arm sockets.
By the time the outrider finally caught us it felt like I was the one who’d just run three and a half miles. Upon dismounting I immediately launched into a ten minute coughing fit. I beat a strategic retreat to the tack room and spent the next forty-five minutes recovering my wind and massaging the blood back into my stunned forearms. My first week as a licensed exercise rider and I’d just been man-handled by my horse in front of everybody on the backstretch. And still, all I could see was the bright side: it beat the hell out of walking hots.
Ontario Thoroughbred Farm Managers Club
THIRTEENTH ANNUAL GOLF TOURNAMENT
MONDAY, October 2nd, 2006
held at the
KLEINBURG GOLF CLUB
115 Putting Green Crescent
(Between Highway 27 & Highway 50 on the Nashville Road)
Golf Tournament Package: $150.00
Includes Green Fee, Cart, Scoring and Dinner
Dinner Only: $50.00 **************************************
Tee Off Time Cash Bar Dinner
12:00pm (Shotgun) 5:00pm
5:30pm
519.938.8578 416.606.6887
In order to assist us with our
Ontario Thoroughbred Farm Managers Club, 4305 King Rd., King City, Ont. L7B 1K4
Booking Deadline – September 18th, 2006
Richard Day,
Kingview Farms
planning please book your foursome early and send your payment to


































































































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