LARRY'S VIEW - BARRIER STAFF CAN BE LIFE-SAVERS

By Larry Cassidy | Friday, July 29, 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.

I mentioned in a previous blog that most of my injuries during my career have been suffered in incidents in the starting barriers and some readers have asked me to give my opinion of the relative merits in terms of safety of the two types of gates with which we are very familiar … those used in Australia and those used in New Zealand.

Unlike here, the barriers in New Zealand are basically open. If a horse rears up, it can turn around and get over … because it is open on the sides and on top. If a horse does do that there is nothing for the jockey to grab onto. For all that I think they work well in New Zealand because the horses there are schooled in them from the start of their career.

They tried to make them here in Australia. They tried them at Hawkesbury and it just didn’t work.

They were not the same people that made them and I don’t think the gates were made to the same specifications. They seem to have a lot more room in them and that obviously gave the horses a lot more room in which to move. That might sound like a good thing, but it is actually a bad thing if the horse has too much space and they had a horrific time with them at Hawkesbury. They ended up getting rid of them.

The gates used in Australia which have a more regulated space, similarly, work well here because the horses are brought up with them. It’s what they are used to.

Here you have something to grab onto if a horse rears in the barriers, but that can also pose a danger to you as you could hit your leg or head against the barrier partitions, so these different styles of gates both have their upside and their downside.

For me, I think I’ve probably got a preference for the ones we use here.

Look, I’ve been hurt a lot of times in the gates, but I’ve been lucky because it could have been worse. Horses are big animals and when they do something in a confined space there is not a lot of room for error.

Luckily, we got great staff around the barriers which can actually be a life-saver sometimes.

Once in Sydney the barrier attendants definitely saved me from getting seriously hurt. The horse went up in the air and then went down and threw me over its head and then flipped upside down in the gate. Just before it flipped upside down, when I was in front of it, somehow the barrier attendant … I don’t know how he did it, it was like he had an extension of his arm … he pulled me out and actually flipped me out the back of the gates.

I don’t know how he did it, but it happened all in a split second and then the horse was actually upside down and thrashing itself around. I would have been underneath it. My saddle got wrecked … absolutely wrecked. It was unusable after that, so you can only imagine the injury the barrier attendant saved me from.

So, in terms of safety, the job that the barrier attendants do is ultimately probably of greater importance than whatever set of gates you are using. The barrier attendants deserve lots of praise for doing a job that is probably hardly noticed by the public on race-days, yet it is so important.

You learn your horses as you go along. Horses that you ride you tend to know their idiosyncrasies … like if they are likely to do anything in the gates. If you see a horse that is an absolute lunatic in the gate, well I’m happy never to ride that horse. You just don’t need to ride that horse … unless you think it is an absolute champion and then you’ll literally try to stay on it and work things out.

I guess if you are going to hurt, you are going to get hurt one way or another. It will happen at the end of the day and there is not much in worrying about it.

Till next week,
Larry

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