The Assistant: Yearlings

/ The Assistant / 16 December 2007 / Leave a Comment

If you don't get it right at the beginning you won't get it right at all. The Assistant discusses young horses that try to kill themselves.

Successful racing yards operate at pace. From feeding at dawn to checking rugs and turning off lights in the evening; amidst the perpetual motion, there is little time for contemplation.

But there are moments when everything seems to stop and you get to appreciate what it is you do.

Sylvia Plath wrote about, "the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo." And sometimes it feels like that; very occasionally you get to pause and remember how awesome - and sometimes how incredibly stupid - these creatures are that you work with.

And the arrival in the yard of the new yearlings at this time of year daily reminds you, in equal measure, of that stupidity and magnificence.

Yearlings arrive on the scene in late summer, either directly from owners' studs or from the sales, and yards deal with them in one of two ways. The aim is to get them rideable and into training, where their maturity allows, as soon as possible.

Option one is for a yard to do it themselves. In this choice madness lies. Starting (a more recent, and much nicer sounding term than the traditional "breaking") yearlings is an incredibly specialist skill, requiring lots of time and patience - two commodities not normally in ample supply in a racing yard.

And this is not the time to get things wrong. In much the same way that human hang-ups are ingrained when young, the experiences of a yearling in the early stages of being handled and ridden will stamp their behaviour for life. A bridle put on roughly at this stage might mean they are never comfortable with a bridle being put on again. A rider who is unbalanced at first could make the horse hang in its races.

And so sending them to a specialist - a starter or breaker - is the only sensible thing to do. Provided they are good at it.

A previous yard I worked at used an imbecile for the job - a relation, and presumably an in-bred relation, of the trainer's wife. Every yearling would arrive back in the yard, accompanied by a reference saying they were bombproof, before promptly exploding at every opportunity.

So establishing a relationship with a good starter is essential - one that will tell you each yearlings' foibles, and advise you of the pace at which you should proceed with them.

But whilst a good starter can ease much of the pain of yearlings coming into the yard, they by no means prevent all problems. Because racehorses, particularly when young, are programmed at birth to seek out ways to kill themselves. And they are very good at it.

In fact, one trainer I worked for defined his profession as: "stopping racehorses committing suicide."

Save for the worries they bring though, having these 18-month olds come into the routine of a racing yard is a fantastic thing to be involved with. For all their psychological immaturity, their physical presence is already awesome, and they develop, day-by-day, at an incredible rate.
And it's the amazement at this progression that provides those moments of calm wonder amidst the surrounding hullabaloo.