LARRY’S VIEW - CLOSE RACING MEANS DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE

By Larry Cassidy | Friday, April 22, 2011

Larry Cassidy currently has forty-two Group 1 successes behind his name. He is a multiple Premiership winning jockey having taken out three titles in Sydney and one in Brisbane. Larry’s View, the personal blog of this top class rider will appear on horseracingonly.com.au every Friday, workload permitting.

Keen racing, when three or four runners are locked together in a driving finish to the line, makes for an exciting spectacle but it can create a situation which is problematical for the jockeys involved.

When you are riding in close quarters it becomes more difficult when you’ve got a left hand rider up against a right-handed rider.

I myself am right-handed so I’ve run into that problem a few times when horses have come very close together.

Obviously you are trying to get the best out of your horse, but when runners race close together it can become very difficult to use your whip in the proper manner without actually hitting the other rider or hitting the other horse.

There is always the chance of you having your whip hit out of your hand or perhaps the other rider’s whip is hit out of their hand.

Quite often you will come in after races with whip marks on your arm. It’s definitely not unusual. Sometimes you might get hit quite hard and your skin will actually have welt marks from a decent crack with the stick.

Nobody goes out trying to hit another rider, but it does happen.

If a rider’s arm action is deliberately changed in order to hit another horse or hit another rider, obviously you are going to be in trouble for that, but it is mostly just the keenness of the competition that leaves you with some battle scars.

When it is that close in the running, if you are trying to ride your horse out and you are going to be hitting the other rider or the other horse then you are not getting the best out of your horse … and also you impede yourself.

When we come very close together and you can’t use your whip in a normal manner, I try to bring my arm up over my head and around … but now you are not legally allowed to do that with the new whip rule.

You are supposed to give your horse every chance to win though, so, if I have to improvise in that situation to try and win a race, I’ll do it, because at least it shows you are having a go.

Occasionally I have had my whip knocked out of my hand.

It happens, for example, when you are coming up alongside another horse and that rider is hitting his horse. You are bringing your whip forward and they are bringing their whip back and if they hit your whip in the right spot, sometimes they can knock it out of your hand.

When you have your whip knocked out of your hand it happens in a fraction of a second so it doesn’t really affect your focus or your horse’s momentum.

My first reaction when it happens is to start hitting my horse on the neck and yelling at my horse as loud as I can to try to get that extra little bit out of it. It might not really help a lot, but at least you are doing something.

Other unexpected things can happen.

I remember when I was an apprentice I was riding out a race. I was riding my horse out and I came up beside another rider, who was a left hand whip rider and we had probably half a horse gap between us, so we were able to use our whips properly.

Underneath the binding on my whip, the shaft was wrapped in a type of nylon, waxy string … and for some reason, when my whip hit his whip, mine actually snapped.

Of course I carried on using it, but the motion of using it made the whip unravel. We were still going head and head and my whip got tangled around his whip and took his whip off him … obviously by accident. It was just that my whip had unraveled.

I came back to scale with his whip. My horse ended up winning the race quite convincingly and there was no protest as the incident was purely accidental.

I think afterwards the length of my whip must have been one-and-a-half metres. It was like I came back with a fishing line and I had caught another whip. It was quite funny!

I’ve also dropped my whip on a number of occasions in my career … usually only once or twice a year.

I fairly recently dropped my whip on a horse called Noisy Ocean. It is one of Bryan Guy’s horses and I won a Saturday race on it in town.

How I dropped it … I was that close to the running rail and, as I was bringing my whip back around, I hit the underneath of the running rail and it flicked out of my hand.

My first reaction was to start slapping the horse on the neck and yelling at him because he is such a lazy sort of horse. We got there, but dropping the whip almost cost me the race.

Overseas, in places like Singapore and Macau … especially Singapore, if you drop your whip you can get in trouble. You are warned and possibly fined and if you repeatedly drop your whip, you can be suspended, because they deem that a way of not trying to let your horse win.

In terms of protesting, I think if your horse is hit over the head you certainly have the right to look at the film and maybe fire in a protest.

The only way you are going to get that protest though is if the rider that has done it has altered his whip action to hit your horse, but providing he has kept his normal whip action then realistically you have come too close to him and, yes, your horse will get hit over the head and you won’t get the race on protest.

So while race-goers like to see exciting racing, they don’t always appreciate the difficulties that riders can face in close and tight finishes where it becomes a game of inches in more ways than one.

Jockeys are required to do their best in all circumstances to maintain the rules of racing and the stewards are charged with the responsibility of overseeing any infractions of the rules that might occur - accidental or otherwise.

It is important that everyone carries out their jobs to an appropriate level, but sometimes, as I have discussed from a riding perspective, it is not always an easy gig.

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