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She's been laid off with a quarter crack for months, but today she came back and beat the pants off the field in a nice lucrative allowance race. My hope to end up an old race horse heiress is kicking back up. The good part about all this is that she's had to be laid off three times since she was three due to minor booboos. This has given her the chance to be now nearly six, with her leg bones fully formed and maybe I can goddam enjoy this without worrying her bones are going to shatter every outing. She is definitely VERY fast. She has numerous quirks that impede the performance, but as she matures they seem to be lessening.
If she's not running hard enough, she likes to sightsee and it's hard to get her attention back on business. The jockeys get in trouble if they are not seen to be doing everything in their power to win the race, and this means they must whip the horse to try to pick up or maintain the speed. Trouble is, our mare REALLY gets huffy about that. When she was three, she would always try to run away from the whip, which made her weave dangerously all over the track. Nonetheless, she would win the races... weaving. The trainer put blinkers on her to see if it would make her run straighter. My mother would NOT let me tell the trainer the whip was the problem. I had to stifle myself.
So that turned into her BUCKING every time she got smacked with the whip. She still would win, but the last quarter mile would be full of bucks. She lost two races and came in second once. The second was because the jockey had tried to pace her too late in the race and she was sulking. The first loss was from melting down about the whip after sulking about being hauled up too late in the race, and the second one the same story. One of those times she almost came to a dead stop to do her bronco act just around midfield just around the clubhouse turn. She has a damn cow about it.
All the rest of her races she's won going away, warts and all. The point I am making is that she's definitely stakes material. She's won two stakes races, but the trainer dropped her down when she melted down over the whip in her first loss. All her wins have been despite taking up all kinds of time with weaving and bobbing and bucking. Now that she's getting older, her tail just flies straight up every time the whip comes down, and the new jockey seems to understand to keep her off the pace from the git so she can blow past everyone later. It drove me NUTS to see the old jockeys remember themselves waaaaay too late in the race, piss off the horse by holding her back in the middle of her run, slowing her down, and then REALLY adding insult to injury with that damn whip.
The stewards will throw out the jockey if he/she doesn't use the whip.
I want a jockey who is accomplished at feigning whip use.
She doesn't need it. She wants to beat the other horses and will so totally do it if you will just let her. Today she was craning her neck to see the stands from about the clubhouse turn, and the jockey was having a hell of a time reminding her she was in a race. He started whipping. Each crack of the whip, the tail went straight up in the air, but it took three good wallops before she decided to concentrate again. She passed everyone and won by four lengths.
Anyway, maybe next year she can go back to just doing stakes races if she will just settle down to business with a jockey who understands her.
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