Joey Ramsden
It has been a frustrating few days with a delayed flight into Dubai. Once getting here, Variety Club’s work was shrouded in fog when, for some obscure reason, the fog settled over Meydan racecourse and made it literally a foot by foot process. All in all, a very strange experience.
t is never easy when one is reliant upon airline times to get to certain places on time, particularly when cutting things fine to start with. Anyway, we live to fight another day. All is well here in Dubai with Variety Club. He looks well and we are just assessing as to where we go for his next possible future target.
It was great to have a winner at the weekend. It is naturally great to have a winner at any time but it was particularly nice to get off the ground with our juveniles. Just about all our juveniles that have run have placed so hopefully that augurs well for the future.
Kingvoldt is a particularly nice horse by Western Winter, a sire we have been extremely lucky with, and I think this fellow is no different. He is definitely one for my note book and one I shall have to start planning a future for.
We have yet to have a juvenile filly winner but we have not run many yet. The ones we have run have all done extremely well and I am happy with the way they are going. I read an extremely interesting piece in the newspaper on the way here, having spent the last couple of weeks trying to find suitable jockeys to ride my horses.
I started off one of my blogs many months ago by saying that Cape Town had an abundance of talented jockeys; well, this now seems to be getting less and less with the departure of Muzi Yeni. Bernard Fayd’Herbe is not quite where he would like it to be and this causes us a few problems and with Greg Cheyne having had a nasty fall and being out for a few weeks, leaves us seriously short of talent in the jockey’s ranks.
Getting back to what I was trying to put across: every few years the National Horseracing Authority decides to put the minimum weights of jockeys up. It has been quite a while since this has happened and maybe it is time it happens again.
This is not just because we are at present using heavyweight jockey, Bernard Fayd’herbe, but as a whole our jockeys certainly seem to be getting taller and taller. One only has to look around the parade ring here in Dubai and see the best jockeys in the world and none of them are short individuals.
Christophe Soumillon, Richard Hughes, James Doyle and George Baker are certainly not shorties. This is definitely something that is not going to change.
Throughout the world humans are getting taller and larger due to improved diets and medication. We are also living longer. If one is taller, it stands to reason one is also heavier so maybe at some point we should be looking at our scales and riding weights to determine the future weights of our jockeys. I don’t think this is something that can be ignored.
It is definitely costing us some quality riders with the majority of them being heavier. It has nothing to do with strength as one would think the smaller ones would have the advantage. One only has to look at our own jockey’s academy with the likes of Jason Smittsdorff and a couple of others to see that they too are getting taller and taller.
It would be interesting to see what the stats and figures are from the Academy regarding young wannabees. I wouldn’t mind having a small bet that it would support these facts. It would be an interesting study.
