# 80yo Trainer's 8yo Stallion's First Race Start



## pasomountain (Dec 19, 2018)

Good for your father! Glad he's still in the game--how fun.  And Baralu is quite beautiful--I am loving his soft expression and all that wavy hair.


----------



## SueC (Feb 22, 2014)

Yeah, that mane!  It could make many a woman jealous. :rofl: Not to mention those long dark eyelashes!


----------



## LoriF (Apr 3, 2015)

Baralu is gorgeous!!! Congrats to him and your dad, Woot!! 

I would probably like racing more if they were all started at an older age.


----------



## SueC (Feb 22, 2014)

Here's an open secret, @LoriF: Racing isn't my favourite thing either. I think there are much better things we can do with horses than run them around circles trying to see who is fastest, which is why my personal favourite equestrian pursuits are trail and endurance riding, (classical) dressage, and just hanging out with them. The biggest problem with horse racing, apart from working immature horses too hard - which usually results in damage to them by age 7-10, well before the end of a showjumper's useful life span, to compare with another type of athlete - is the massive amounts of horses that come out of the process while still young, destined by their sheer numbers, and by injuries, for dog food, or as cheap horses for people who know very little about riding and are going to give them a worse fate than a bullet: Ignorant treatment.

Unfortunately, there is such a sea of horses bred by the TB and STB racing industries that there will never be enough good homes to absorb their numbers. Just like with greyhound racing.


----------



## LoriF (Apr 3, 2015)

Yes, there is a whole lot of things that could be better with horse racing.


----------



## trailhorserider (Oct 13, 2009)

So awesome! I really enjoyed watching that.


Do any of these pacers learn to rack under saddle (once retired)? I would love to own a racking horse some day. They look like more fun that a barrel of monkeys! I noticed the pace and rack have some similarities and I think some of the racking horses in the USA are Standardbreds.


----------



## SueC (Feb 22, 2014)

trailhorserider said:


> Do any of these pacers learn to rack under saddle (once retired)? I would love to own a racking horse some day. They look like more fun that a barrel of monkeys! I noticed the pace and rack have some similarities and I think some of the racking horses in the USA are Standardbreds.


STBs do often offer alternative gaits under saddle if you let them. Romeo did, for example - although @knightrider or someone else knowledgeable riding a gaited riding horse will have to tell me if there's any "real" rack here or just something that feels like it!  

Here's two clips of Romeo offering gaits other than a walk. It's a bit of an anomalous clip because this horse was 26 at this point and hadn't been ridden for years. We'd just adopted him, and on the spring flush he came into on our pasture, he was soon looking so good and had so much energy that I decided to hop on and take him for a little ride. I used to ride this horse a lot in my 20s and early 30s, although on the clips, my riding is anything but exemplary - we were still getting used to everything with each other again, and this is literally seconds after I hopped on. The saddle fit wasn't great, and I think it irritated him, and I couldn't sit properly in it because of the strange angle it was at, so my back was all skewiff. And, this horse had a lot of head movement, which was not the case with either my Arabian mare or Sunsmart, so I'm having trouble with the rhythm of the "give" here - and it would take a few sessions to get smooth at that again.






On the "return" his young buddy horse was wanting to run, and Romeo was very competitive, so at one point he wanted to do a "liftoff" and race off, but that wasn't happening on a first ride in years, at his age, so I ended up turning him in a circle to stop him taking off. I also go all super-floppy and relaxed when horses get tense, as a counter-measure. Often, the difference between that and normal muscular tension in me transfers to the horse, who then doesn't rush off.






When we rode regularly, and I was adapted to him, he was an unbelievably smooth, elastic ride. He was also without question the fastest horse I ever rode. He was the fastest sprinter my family ever had, in harness, at the pace, and he also had a gallop that felt like you were flying. The turbo-charged take-off when I let him go was very much like the feeling in a jumbo jet at lift-off.

This is the same two horses enjoying their liberty that summer:











If a STB is a natural pacer - which means they can pace from birth and do it in the paddock - then it will offer to pace under saddle. Most natural pacers are also good trotters, so you can have both gaits. Chip, whom I rode a lot for cross-training when he was a young racehorse 20 years ago, was excellent at both gaits, and you could cue him to do one or the other, just like you can cue horses to do "standard" gaits.

Sunsmart is from a trotting line, and not a natural pacer. He couldn't be trained to pace properly in hopples either; all he learnt from that was to canter disunited when irritated, which I had to train him out of when I saddle educated him. He's a lovely riding horse:






The one non-standard gait he has is the racing trot. We do this out riding regularly, but obviously I don't have cameramen following me around! Here's what it looks like in the paddock - this is a spook at the racing trot - so the head is up, and it isn't when we're trail riding.






Oh, and he secretly wants to be a cow horse! :rofl:






These horses really are so much fun!


----------



## knightrider (Jun 27, 2014)

Sorry, I'm no expert on gaits. I just ride them. It looked like at the very beginning of the video that Romeo was starting to do some sort of interesting gait. And at the end he was clearly pacing. I can tell a pace and I can tell a corto by the sound. Running walk I can tell when I am riding. But I can't tell a rack from a running walk from a fox trot. There is so much I don't know.

My neighbor says, "I used to be able to ride, but now I just sit up there." That's me too.


----------



## SueC (Feb 22, 2014)

:rofl:, @knightrider!

Romeo is initially trotting coming back on the sand track (much concealed by bushes), then he's pacing slowly, but after that he drops into and out of a 4-beat slowing down, the same 4-beat they do when "walking" in hopples. It's a very rapid left back-left front-left back-right front-right gait that feels like the horse is rolling when you ride it. If you pause the clip at intervals, you'll see he's not using leg pairs for it. The pace is a swinging two-beat - even more so with this bloke, who was a body pacer - swung his entire body as he paced - as opposed to a leg pacer, whose body stays straight while the legs do their thing. The body pacers are generally faster than the leg pacers.

I love the moniker "some sort of interesting gait"!


----------



## SueC (Feb 22, 2014)

I re-watched the race clip and noticed that the horse has his ears pricked forward for most of the race. This is unusual when horses run flat out, as it turns the ears into insect collectors and wind tunnels!







He did look very "oooh-aaah" - or maybe it was a case of, "







I've never been in such a tumultuous, large crowd before, I think I'll run away!"







Trials generally have 4-5 horses where he trials, sometimes less. So this will have been his biggest field, and if my father is still doing his standard hermit training, his horse will be doing most of his training solo, without other horses present to run with...


----------



## Spanish Rider (May 1, 2014)

This is so great when people later in life are still active, reaching new goals and feeling accomplished. I remember my uncle hit his first hole-in-one after the age of 80. This is a big thing for golfers of any age, so we had a party, and there were comments like, "Finally!" and "Now I can die happy." 

Funny thing is, just last year my eldest son hit a hole-in-one at the age of 16. His comment? "Well, I guess I'm done." :rofl:


----------

