Thoroughbred Racing – The Athletics of Horse Riders
No athlete works harder than jockeys and few athletes are less understood. According to one study, which ranked sports by the number of deaths per 1,000 participants, thoroughbred horse racing is the most dangerous athletic activity, beating skydiving, hang gliding, mountain climbing, scuba diving, college football and boxing, among others. In an average year, the Jockeys’ Guild receives 2,500 injury reports, and a typical jockey will be sidelined with injuries at least three times.
It’s not just luck that keeps a great jockey in the saddle of a 1400 pound Thoroughbred horse as it races at speeds up to 55 MPH. These highly coordinated men and women must remain upright in the chair, striking an exquisitely difficult balance to avoid falling forward or backward in the chair (which could easily prove fatal). While making this tremendous effort, they must simultaneously keep a cool head, make strategic calculations, and “read” the horse’s mood, processing enormous amounts of information microsecond by microsecond. They must practice consummate athleticism, combining strength, coordination, and calculation all at once.
And then there’s the whole weight thing.
Like wrestlers, jockeys’ lives are ruled by a scale. If you don’t make the weight, you can’t compete, and the weights that riders have to maintain are almost unimaginably low for most average-sized adults. Horses are assigned to carry riders in different graduated weight classes, called “fascias,” and in the 1920s fascias ranged from 83 to 130 pounds. Jockeys during this period, “the tough-as-nails heroic age of American horse racing,” were known to live on 600-calorie-a-day diets, depriving themselves so much of water that they had to lie in bathtubs. of ice cubes to prevent overheating and return to work minutes after sustaining near-fatal injuries. Some of them would run for hours in the scorching sun under layers of clothing, hoping to lose that last crucial ounce.
And those were the less extreme expedients that the jockeys of the 1930s resorted to. As Laura Hillenbrand recounts in Seabiscuit, her fascinating 2001 account of the great late-’30s racehorse of that name, jockeys were known to use homemade diuretics in prodigious amounts, purging what little they ate with Epsom salts, water and other potent concoctions that occasionally exploded bottles of them. Bulimia was common. So were pneumonia and tuberculosis, caused, some historians believe, by weakness due to the traumatic effects of malnutrition. Most frightening of all, some riders willingly swallowed tapeworms. After the intestinal parasite had helped them “reduce”, they went to the hospital for a visit and lost the worm “until it was time to “reduce” again.
Today’s jockeys still have to guard against anorexia and bulimia, common occupational hazards in this sport as well as several others with weight requirements (dance, gymnastics, running, wrestling). Most apprentice riders cannot afford to weigh more than 105 pounds, and very experienced Thoroughbred racers must maintain around 113, hard to believe. (Naturally, tall people are rarely allowed to race thoroughbred horses.) travel schedules’ up to twelve races a day, for some. Above all, riders must love their horses, displaying the same intuition and sympathy for them that characterize great trainers. That ability alone can allow them to make the split-second judgment calls that win races. And that love alone could make the pain, deprivation, hard work, and sacrifice worth it.
Watching Thoroughbred horse racing, on the other hand, can be just as exciting and pleasurable as practicing it can be exhausting. Whether you’re a fan of horse racing betting or just love the thrill of live horse racing, the sport is just as full of drama and passion as any other. Tipping services can help you maximize your enjoyment of thoroughbred horse racing by clarifying the details and letting you know who the favorites are.