On a soapbox

Today's lesson comes from the book of Wath, beginning at chapter 1984. Chapter 1984? Well, that's when I started work. Leaving school after sitting my A-levels and then Oxbridge, I started work for Andy Turnell at Ogbourne Maisey. It was a great stable in which to begin one's working life. Andy was then in his, I think, third season as a trainer, having retired from race-riding to take over his father's stable earlier than he had intended because of the death of the latter. Anyway, I was working for a great horseman in a stable of lovely horses, owned by good owners and looked after by really good staff. Andy had already saddled a Cheltenham Festival steeplechase winner (Tracy's Special, pictured) and the stable also included the subsequent Grand National winner Maori Venture, as well as a novice hurdler called Tawridge who became a top novice steeplechaser a couple of years later. It was a great place to learn plenty - and one of the many things which I learned was that horses should always wear boots on their front legs when jumping. Apparently, years previously Bob Turnell had changed his plans when up on the Downs and asked a very good horse to school - and, as that hadn't been the plan, the horse wasn't wearing boots. Anyway, the horse struck into himself (the front of his back hoof struck the back, ie the tendon, of the front leg) and the horse was badly injured. He didn't make the same mistake twice, and Andy never made it either. Anyway, I thus grew into adulthood knowing that horses should always wear boots when jumping, either at home or in races.

There was, of course, a catch. Those old-style leather boots weren't actually much use: better than nothing, admittedly, but if one struck them with an axe - which effectively is what happens when a horse's back leg strikes the front one at that speed - the blade (ie the hind shoe) goes straight through and into the leg below. This was graphically shown to me when I took a steeplechaser to Folkestone in maybe 1986 or '87 and he struck into himself landing over the fence past the stands, which I suspect might then have been a water jump. The horse was put down on the spot as the injury was chronic and the damage irreparable.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I started training. I began by using boots on all jumpers. But it kept gnawing at me that this might not necessarily be correct: it's only natural to question everything that you have been brought up to believe to be axiomatic. By this stage, boots were no longer the norm, and it certainly hadn't escaped my notice that the greatest trainer of them all, Martin Pipe, never used them. As I say, their advantage (because they didn't actually offer that much protection) was not nearly as great as one would like to believe, and there certainly were disadvantages. They were a potentially race-losing extra weight; fitted badly or applied incorrectly, they could do significant damage, internal or external to the leg; and it was now felt that, because their insulating properties made the tendon even hotter during exertion than it gets anyway, they might damage the tendon by over-heating it. So I stopped using them, believing that I was taking a step forward. Then, on 1st June 2006, Ngauruhoe (pictured as a yearling three years previously with her friend A Fortunate Life) struck into herself in a hurdle race at Wetherby. Whether it need necessarily have been a fatal injury I do not know. She travelled well for the first half of the race but was going nowhere and moving badly for the final circuit, but the jockey didn't seem to realise that there was anything amiss, kept going and got round eventually. As soon as she eased back from a canter to a trot, it was clear that she was hopping lame. The damage to the tendon was enough for the wise veterinary advice to be that putting her down there and then was the humane and sensible option.

I don't need to tell you how upset I was. And you will understand that I reassessed my ideas: "taught wisdom by disaster", to borrow a phrase from 'The Fox's Prophecy', and thus demonstrating that, while the clever course of action is to learn from other people's mistakes, in practice the way it works is that one has to make them for oneself before the learning properly takes place. Anyway, I concluded that, even if boots have their drawbacks and even if they don't provide much protection at all, some protection has to be better than none at all when horses' lives are at stake, because, when jumping at speed, striking into himself/herself is not uncommon. Thenceforth boots were once de rigeur, certainly as far as I was, and am, concerned. And the icing on the cake came a couple of years later when we discovered the modern Tri-zone boots, which really are the best. Their design eliminates the worries of the downsides (they are very light, well ventilated and they fit in a kind of seemingly-cumbersome manner which actually makes it almost impossible to apply them too tightly). And, most of all, you can't cut through them as they have a titanium strip down the back. The manufacturers had reached the conclusion which I (and presumably many others) had reached that existing boots were virtually useless, and hence they had made it their goal to make the one and only boots which really do do what one wants them to do. So now that is what we invariably use - and we've already saved one horse's career, and almost certainly his life. January 2nd 2011, Alcalde ran in a novice hurdle at Plumpton. He put in a mighty leap at the last hurdle with a circuit to go, took off a stride too soon, really had to stretch out to get over it, and landed in a heap steeply on the other side. That is just about the classic scenario for a horse striking into himself - and is why a disproportionate amount of such injuries have happened at water jumps - and that's exactly what he did. But he's still alive. He had a reasonable wound on the leg as it was, but that soon healed, even if the boot had to be replaced. And he won at Fakenham 28 days later. Without Tri-zone boots he would have either been dead or retired (probably dead) by that time. The photographs in this paragraph and the next one tell their own story: have a look, and you won't need me to explain what would have happened had his near-fore leg been unprotected.

So what's brought this on, you might ask? Well, you might have guessed: Master Minded's career-ending injury at Kempton in the King George. I read that Paul Nicholls said that Azeryuiop's career had ended for a similar reason, and you can be sure that he'll have had umpteen lesser names find either their careers or their lives cut short in the same way over the years. I've become something of an evangelist for Tri-zone boots, because I genuinely believe that many, many horses' lives would be saved if these boots' use in jumps races became widespread, rather than a rarity as it is now. I've just watched the replay of the King George on the RUK website and, while it's hard to tell from the film, I don't think that any horse in the race was wearing boots at all, never mind the one type of boots which do work, Tri-zone boots. We're told that the key to training is paying attention to minor details, but this is a major lapse on a frighteningly widespread scale by people who really ought to know better. I was showing these boots to Richie McGrath when I was at Market Rasen with Kadouchski in November, and he was telling me that he'd ridden a second the previous day and that, apparently, the mare who had beaten him in that race had struck into herself in the race and was put down afterwards. I'm not talking about a once-in-a-blue-moon occurence, but one of the more frequent injuries, and an injury which is extremely serious, fatal even, in a worryingly high proportion of cases. I don't like the nanny-state approach to the running of racing (and everything else) under which we labour nowadays. There are bloody 'health and safety' rules about everything. You can't have a training license unless you have a fire extinguisher in your yard - I ask you, as if that would do any use at all if the place catches fire, which it might do once every few thousand years! I can lead any two horses around this stable on their head collars (and I mean on their head collars, not on ropes attached to their head collars) but if I tried to lead more than one horse at a time in the racecourse stables, or to lead one without a bit in his/her mouth, I'd be up before the stewards. And yet those same stewards would be happy for me to run a horse in a jumps race not wearing Tri-zone boots. Madness! I would lead Alcalde in one hand and Ex Con in another, no bit in either mouth, for a thousand miles before I would let either run in a jumps race without Tri-zone boots, because I am interested in the horses' safety, rather than ticking a few boxes to give the impression to those who don't know better that I'm adhering to 'best practice'. It's the same with the whip review, and the modifications to the Aintree fences: racing has a veterinary advisor, Tim Morris, who seems a caring and sensible man - and yet he has been forced to waste his time with the whip review, which as we know has virtually nothing to do with equine welfare at all and yet, as far as I know, has never been asked to look into what horses do or don't wear on their legs in jumps races, which is a far, far more pressing issue. I've even read him quoted in the papers about the whip rules, something which ought not to fall within his remit at all - and yet I've never once heard him mention the absence of Tri-zone boots on all too many jumpers' front legs.

Here endeth the lesson - and if this chapter leads to one more jumper wearing Tri-zone boots in his races, then the time spent writing it won't have been wasted.