IMPORTANCE OF PONIES, CHELTENHAM STARTS & KA YING RISING.

John Francome, a man I deeply admire, does not believe experience of pony racing is the right equine education for budding jump jockeys. Francome's formative years was spent show jumping, rising to the top as a junior, as you would expect from someone regarded as one the best jockeys ever to sit on a horse. When he joined Fred Winter, horse racing was a foreign world to him and he could not name a jockey or a trainer other than Winter. He was also his own man, even as a teenager. One day, as Fred Winter and Richard Pitman waited on the schooling grounds for Francome to join them, Pitman, who knew Winter as a man who did not tolerate lateness or bad manners, yet seemingly turned a blind eye to the misdemanours and foolery of Francome, asked his boss why he put-up with Francome's singularity. He was told succintly 'because he's best I have ever seen on a horse.' 

So, perhaps show-jumping is where youngsters should begin to hone their skills. Harry Skelton, also had a background in show-jumping -he is a Skelton after all - but he is investing some of his Jockeys Cup winnings into tutoring eight of the best youngsters currently taking part in pony racing. Four boys and four girls will be chosen for one-on-one tutoring from Harry, as well as media training and vists to brother Dan's stables for further insight into what it takes to be a successful jockey.

Ideally, I suppose, youngsters should experience both show-jumping and pony racing, though a child would need very wealthy parents with a lot of time on their hands to be able to facillitate such a lifestyle. Good racing ponies are expensive, surprisingly so, as would be a good jumping pony. But at least Harry's investment in wannabe jockeys will offer the lucky eight wisdom from someone whose father was one of the best show-jumping riders of all-time. Though whether that will placate one of the greatest jump jockeys of all-time is another thing altogether.

Francome once said, as an aside, that the three best jockeys at presenting a horse at a fence were Rachel Blackmore, Harry Cobden and Bryony Frost. Not Harry Skelton, you will notice.

Mr.Gill of Gravesend, in a letter to the Racing Post this morning, reminds us of the high number of false starts at the Cheltenham Festival last year. Most false starts are unneccesary; as long as the horses are facing forward, does it matter if a few of them are trotting or even on the verge of breaking into a canter? The nonsense of having riders take their mounts so far back from the tape that they cannot hear the staarter's instructions is more than half the problem. My solution is simple: have a box five yards off the tape, large enough for thirty horses to be accommodated, laid out with sawdust or vegetable dye, and once all the horses are in that box it becomes the jockeys responsibility to have them facing the tape. And off they go. My suggestion would not be 100% foolproof as horses are not machines, their is no brake pedal. But you would have far less false starts and hard luck stories, of that I am sure.

I usually only write about that which I care about. The Longine Awards I have no interest in. It is opinion-based, largely, as is this modest website. But it seems to defy logic that a horse that has won 18 races in a row, even if he is a sprinter trained in Hong Kong, does not win the award. I have nothing against Calandagan, the best of the best, apparently, in 2025. But how many horses throughout the world are currently unbeaten in 18-races, most of them graded races? I do not care too much about this oversight. I do care, though, about fairness and it seems to me that whoever was responsible for the judgement were more keen on a memorial to the late Aga Khan than on actual achievement on the racecourse.