Chop chop!

We've had some great evening racing on the TV over the past couple of days, with Sandown on Thursday and the Curragh on Friday.  Horses being late into the parade ring seemed to be a big issue at Sandown.  This is something which is close to my heart (and which has featured on this blog a few times in the past) as it's something which always plays on one's mind on raceday.  In the great scheme of things, getting the horse saddled quickly is not a major concern as it is not a matter of life or death (as opposed to getting it done well, which is).  But in general the saddling is a stressful and important enough part of a stressful day without the extra stress of feeling obliged to rush.  The threat of a fine is one part of it; but, leaving that aside, you don't like to be late anyway.  And often that's not easy.

One might ask why horses being late into the parade ring is a more pressing issue nowadays than previously.  I think that the main reason is that there's much more pressure for races to be off on time than there used to be.  It is not just that there are now TV schedules to be adhered to; another factor is that the TV schedules are often tighter than they used to be because there are more races.  Whatever - much more importance has been placed on off-times in recent years than ever used to be the case.  The facile answer is that more horses are saddled in the stables nowadays (largely because at some tracks one no longer has to ask for permission to saddle in the stables, so most people do it because it is generally much easier doing it there) but I think that that's hardly a factor.

At, say, Sandown, the pre-parade ring is right next to the entrance to the stable-yard, so the post-saddling walk to the parade-ring is probably only about a minute longer if it starts in the yard rather than in the pre-parade ring.  For sure, a minute is a minute, and when one is tight for time a minute is the difference between being late and not.  But, set against that, the fact of saddling in the stable will often shorten the procedure by more than a minute: horses are so much more relaxed in the racecourse stables that they generally just stand there while being saddled, just like at home, whereas many of them are more (often much more) restive and pushy in the saddling boxes.  That can easily add more than a minute to the time taken to saddle.

Obviously this is not the only factor so certainly isn't always the deciding factor, but when I'm booking a jockey, if all other factors were equal (which they rarely are) I would always choose one who is likely not to be riding in the previous race over one who is.  That just gives you a bit of extra time.  Or quite a lot of extra time, often.  If you're waiting for your jockey to come back in from a ride in the previous race, what you don't want is for the race to be a long one and for the jockey to win it (as then he is likely to be interviewed).  If it is over jumps, you really don't want his horse to fall or be pulled up.  But what you really want, more than anything else, is there for there to be 35 minutes between races rather than 30.  That always makes a massive difference.  When there are 35 minutes, you pretty much never have a problem.  When there are 30 minutes, you're always rushing, and that's when mistakes are made.  And mistakes made when saddling can be fatal, albeit not for the saddler.

The one time I was fined for being late into the parade ring was at Towcester.  The jockey was in the previous race (which was over three miles and had been late off; and there were 30 minutes between races) and by the time he weighed out, we were 15 minutes from race-time.  I ran out of the weighing room to saddle her, but that wasn't enough, unfortunately.  Mind you, even if your jockey isn't in the previous race, it can be less easy to get him weighed out early (and I have used 'him', rather than 'him/her' deliberately) than you would think.  There have been times when I have asked for a jockey to weigh out 40 minutes before the race, only for the weighing-out to take place 25 or fewer minutes beforehand.  I've known cases of a jockey not riding in the previous race and still being the last to weigh out.

A further complication, of course, is that you might want to watch the previous race.  And not just for the fun of watching it, but because one of the ways of working out the nowadays-seemingly-ubiquitous but ever-changing track-bias is by watching the previous races.  And I'm not just being over-particular here: I would say that, to my reading of the situation anyway, appearing not to have watched the previous races cost West Coast's connections dear in the 2018 Dubai World Cup.  The only way you would have instructed the jockey to ride him as he did would have been if you hadn't watched the earlier races.

I think that Sandown was an unusual example because apparently a horse was re-shod at the start before the first race, which meant that that race was six minutes late off, so they were under pressure throughout after that.  And then the winner of the fourth race, Regal Reality, apparently was very difficult in the preliminaries, firstly refusing to enter the parade ring and then being unwilling to walk out onto the track.  I've probably spent too much time analysing a meeting which I didn't attend, but it does annoy me reading or hearing (as I did after Sandown) overviews of meetings which seem to be written or spoken on the assumption that trainers whose horses are late into the parade ring are either slack or bloody-minded, because I promise you that, in my experience, that is very, very far from the case.