Decline and fall

In my musings in the chapter which I wrote last night about how ludicrous it is for modern-day trainers to whinge about the necessity of using medication to enable horses to race, I pointed out that horses coped with a far more exacting regime in the pre-medication days than would ever be the case nowadays.  I love reading racing history books so am very familiar with the types of schedules which horses used to face in days of yore, but I thought that there's no harm in coming up with a couple of examples to illustrate the point.

I have recently read Bill O'Gorman's latest book, 'A Land Of Lost Content - Some History Of Racing'.  There are some cracking examples in that, including one which has put me right on one piece of racing history, because this corrects a misconception which I have passed on all to often.  I had previously swallowed and repeated the widely-held belief that when Lord George Bentinck's colt Elis travelled from Goodwood to Doncaster in a horse-draw cart to win the St Leger in 1836, he became the first winner to travel by 'horse-box'.  That, apparently is not so, as Bill relates:-

"The Lincolnshire Ox painted by Stubbs stood 6 feet 4 inches high and weighed 2,880 pounds.  In 1790 he was transported to London for by means of a "machine" drawn by eight horses, and a similar bullock van brought Royal Sovereign from Worcestershire to win the Newmarket St. Leger in 1816.  In 1836 Lord George Bentinck repeated the experiment when Elis was rushed from Goodwood to win the St. Leger, covering 80 miles per day in a specially designed van drawn by relays of post horses."

How about these for one showing up how easy today's horses have things?  "In 1830 Priam and trainer Will Chifney left Newmarket on the Friday week before the Derby.  They travelled 21 miles to Newport on the first day, reached Epping on the second day and gave a press conference in Sloane Square on the Sunday.  The horse was at Epsom quite comfortably a week before the race.  He won in good style after surviving 23 false starts.  Trainer J. G. Lyall in his autobiography records the last forced march by a racehorse about a century later.  His mare Cabbage happened to win at Chester when a coal strike stopped all trains, and her lad alternately led and rode her 150 miles home.  The five-day march had no apparent ill effects and she won again a few days later."

Or this?  "In 1839 the famous "lazy" Lanercost won the Ayr Gold Cup for Malton trainer William l'Anson.  He walked to Catterick, where they tried Easingwold with him for the St. Leger, and walked on to Doncaster.  There he won a race and finished second to the St. Leger winner in the Cup.  The following week he was second twice at Liverpool.  He sailed to Glasgow and won twice at the Caledonian Hunt meeting at Cupar on October 1st.  Going by van to Kelso, he won the Berwickshire Gold Cup on the 15th.  On the 17th he won the Gold Cup and another race at Dumfries.

"L'Anson was known as a hard taskmaster, and this cross-border skirmishing seemingly took so little out of Lanercost that his trainer thought a raid deep into enemy territory for the first Cambridgeshire Handicap at Newmarket on the 28th was indicated.  Travelling night and day in a van meant that Lanercost, who always suffered greatly with his feet anyway, arrived at Newmarket so sore all over that he could scarcely move.  The old-fashioned remedy of piling on clothing to sweat out the stiffness apparently worked.  "He almost jumped through Boyce's and Rogers's window" in the High Street on his way to the course and beat a field of thirty-three."

I am currently reading Nick Godfrey's latest book, 'Postcards from the World of Horse Racing - Days Out on the Global Racing Road'.  It's a great read, both entertaining and informative, and containing some great postcards.  In the postcard from Baden Baden, Nick mentions the feat of the great Kincsem (winner of 54 of her 54 races) in winning the Grosser Preis three times, 1877 to '79.  The second of those three victories represented the third leg of a mighty international treble.  At the start of August she won the Goodwood Cup (then arguably the biggest race in England).  (And that was at a time when Goodwood was hard enough to reach even from London, never mind from Budapest).

She then headed by boat to Deauville where she won the Grand Prix de Deauville (then arguably the biggest race in France) towards the end of the month.  She then crossed the full width of France (by train, presumably) and into Germany to win the Grosser Preis von Baden (then as now Germany's biggest race) early in September.  Just the travelling between the races represented a tough schedule, never mind the races themselves.  And all without Regumate, anabolic steroids, cortico-steroids, Lasix, bute of any other supposedly-important infernal potions anywhere on the radar.  How have we (trainers and breeders - and I'm both!) gone so badly wrong?