Page 28 - December 2006 The Game

28 The Game, December 2006
Canada’s Thoroughbred Racing Newspaper
One Good Hand Does Not a Rider Make
by evenSteven
One important aspect of working at the racetrack involves knowing the proper use of the backstretch lingo. Like any sport or profession, horse racing possesses its own internalized language with a multiplicity of meanings lost on the casual outsider. After three years of walking hots, I thought I was beginning to get a handle on racetrack vocabulary – but after my first year as an exercise rider, I realize I’ve barely touched the tip of the iceberg.
Take for example the term rider. To the layperson, rider could be aptly used to describe any person whose position or occupation places him upon the back of a horse. To a racetracker, however, rider can be used in a number of ways. First and foremost, the jockey is known as a rider or race-rider. But a jockey can also be a rider without necessarily being a rider. In the case of the latter, the term rider is used in admiration– even awe – for the tiny men and women who, literally, hold the reins of the sport in their hands. More than once I’ve heard one afficionado remark to another: "Now that’s what I call a rider – he’s not afraid to blast through those tight holes." But rider can also be used pejoratively, as a condemnation of a jockey’s lack of sense or skill or even a possible lack of courage, as in: He’s no rider.
Ironically, even though it actually reads ‘Exercise Rider’ on my Hastings Park gallop license, I’ve never heard rider used in any backstretch discussion concerning exercise riders, who tend to be described in the more diminutive gallop boys or gallop girls. If a gallop boy is to be complimented on his abilities at all, one will usually hear him described not as a talented rider but as a good hand.
Similarly, the word ride can also be applied in any number of ways. As a noun: That horse got a good ride–describing the particular skill or lack thereof demonstrated by the jockey during the running of a race. As a verb: Ride him! - used mainly as an exclamation of fellowship or support for a fellow gallop boy or girl–especially where the equine ‘him’ in question is bucking hell-bent-for-leather, and the gallop boy in question (or rider, if the buck-ee happens to be a jockey)
is hanging on for dear life. But from this moment on, the use of ride as verb tumbles into varying shades of grey.
I first became aware of the difficulty of understanding ride as verb during some recurring difficulties with a young horse at the starting gate. As I urged my unwilling baby towards the gate, my recalcitrant mount demonstrated a determined sense of purpose in his absolute refusal to entertain any notion whatsoever of entering the aforementioned starting gate–the appearance of which I can only surmise must have suggested nothing so much as a narrow, twelve foot high, steel-encased equine coffin.
"C’mon, little baby," I said, clucking my tongue in my habitually patient and polite fashion–to which one of the gate crew, the somewhat sternly avuncular Charlie–with considerably less patience–responded thusly: "Come on, Stevie. Ride that horse."
Ride that horse? I wondered. But wasn’t I already riding my horse by virtue of the very act of sitting upon it? Unsure as to Charlie’s meaning, I leaned forward and rocked my ass in the saddle, as if the horse were merely stuck in the mud and required only the suggestion of his previous momentum to precipitate his continued forward motion.
Charlie shook his head hopelessly. I’d obviously failed to glean the meaning behind his directive. A moment later he and two other starters literally picked up horse and me both and lifted us bodily into the starting gate.
The next day I returned upon the same horse who demonstrated the same admirable lack of willingness to load. This time Charlie didn’t waste any time: "C’mon Stevie, don’t just sit there now, you gotta ride that horse. Ride him."
Not wanting to display any more of my ignorance than absolutely necessary, I sat up a little straighter and gathered my seat, in case what Charlie was referring to was a lack of form.
"No, no," Charlie said. "You gotta ride him. RIDE him–use your stick."
"Oh," I said. A light bulb flickered in my head as I forged this mental connection: With respect to gate
crew, riding your horse means using your stick as a means of precipitating forward propulsion. Having been educated in the school of one good crack of the stick is worth a dozen tappity-taps, I cracked my horse on the backside, which resulted in the horse rearing up and dumping me on my own backside in the dirt.
"Not like that," Charlie said, not unkindly, as he boosted me back in the saddle. "You gotta ride him, you know, use your stick, little taps, like tap tap tap."
I now understood "Ride him"– at least in the context of trying to load an unwilling horse into the starting gate–means to tap lightly and repeatedly on one or both flanks to help urge the unwilling horse into position. Between my tap-tap-taps and some grunting and pushing on the part of the starting crew, we loaded my horse into the gate and successfully broke him out. Ride him. Got it.
So you can imagine my confusion a couple of weeks later when I returned to the starting gate, on a different horse this time–albeit a different horse with the same affliction: he didn’t want to load into the gate either.
"Let’s go, Stevie. Ride that horse," Charlie called from the port bow.
Tap-tap-tap, goes my stick. Tap-tap-tap.
"Geez-es!" Charlie moaned, shaking his head with real sorrow. Observing the depth of Charlie’s dismay I almost felt guilty, as if I’d disappointed him on a personal level.
"C’mon, Stevie. A fly wouldn’t feel those little taps. You’ve got to give him something to make him think about it. You’re never going to get his attention with little taps like that."
I forgot what happened after that, except eventually we managed to get my horse into the gate and break him out. I was too distracted by my latest revelation. After all this time it seemed maybe I’d finally figured it out. Apparently the Inuit people have over two hundred different meanings for the word ‘snow.’ After that last visit to the gate I decided that ride is to racetrackers as snow is to Inuit.
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