Off to the races, again

Satwa Sunrise, on her way to the rond de présentation

With Christmas in the middle, there has hardly been time to write about the last race, and thinking about the next race, I could barely concentrate on Christmas. The tree finally got decorated, after sitting in the house for a week, on Christmas Eve. My husband's right; I do live life as a series of passions. Only, he is also a little bit wrong; some of them stick.

The race on December 21, the winter solstice, was my first time ever at the racetrack. Before last Wednesday, my experience of the races was limited to books, like The Black Stallion series, and to television for the major race events, like Goldikova's final race in the 2011 Breeders' Cup at Churchill Downs. It's a strange thing when you tiptoe up to your long held fascinations, preparing to see them for the first time, and horse racing and the tracks are among the strangest, for me.

The "Sport of Kings", you hear, and, yet, there is a slice of every aspect of life at the racecourses. The entire court, as it were, from the scullery maids and lowliest of the stable lads to the kings and sheiks themselves, sweeping up the currents of the noblesse de robe -- the nouveau riche -- and the old money and privilege from around the world along the way to the backside and the grandstand, the private dining rooms and the owners' and trainers' salle. Everyone finds his or her place at the races.

The grandstand, however, this December day, was empty. A far cry from the photos of Deauville in July and August, full of parisiens and vacationers, arms and faces and long legs glowing in hues of bronze and gold, trees in full leaf blowing in the gentle breezes off the English Channel. There were more pigeons than spectators, but the total money placed on the races has only risen, if the numbers at the racecourses around the world are dropping, as a general rule. With television channels like France's Equidia, providing the prognostics, horse by horse, and broadcasting nearly every race in the year, information immediately available on the Internet, and the PMU on the street corner, where you can lean your elbows on the zinc and have an easy drink with friends, why would you show up at the races if you can spare yourself the prix du carburant and the tolls, unless you own or train a horse, and know those from the backside privileged to gain access to the private rooms of the tribune?

I thought about all this as I followed Gina Rarick through the racing procedure, and benefited from her network of professional connections, receiving a warm smile and a nod, being, as I was, in her wake. Had I come on my own, I'd not only have had to figure out where to park and enter the hippodrome, I would have had to discover if an entry fee is required, and I would have been limited to the grandstand seats facing the track, pigeons wading in winter puddles between the spur and the outer turf track, or inside the all-weather track. I would have been very nearly alone. I might have visited the restaurant on the top floor, and wandered to discover a bar, where coffee or drinks are offered, along with the company of strangers. I might have dared to see if a pass were required to walk along between the boxes, organized around exercise circles, camera in hand, perhaps being taken for an habituée. A smile and a nod at others, who do not recognize you, always helps.

I watched Sunrise walk around the exercise circle in her blanket, GR on the lower back corner, and I thought, "She won't embarrass anyone today, this filly."

She looked right at home, after a two-month break from racing in which she traveled from the racetracks of England and the sales at Newmarket to her new home in France, a Meshaheer fille de France returned to race in her native country, complete with the bonus for French-bred horses. Stepping down from the van and walking briskly alongside Mark to her box, you could tell she knew where she was, and why she was there. A professional, with her 7 races under her belt. Her music wasn't bad, 3p Ap 3p 6p 8p 9p 7p. She had shown a steady progression and placed in 2 of 7. No, she didn't shamble, like some of the others, who looked a little like they'd have rather stayed at home. She held her head high and looked with a keen eye all around her, particularly each time she passed anyone from her yards; she knew her people.

There was one other horse, walking around the exercise circle, who caught my eye.

"That's the favorite," Gina told me, "with his trainer. He's good."

I wondered if she meant the horse or the trainer. Both looked intense.

Lucky Harry is a 4-year-old Equerry gelding, and looked as professional, alert, proud and thoroughly at home at Deauville as Sunrise. No wonder he's the favorite, I thought. He has won twice, and Equerry is owned by Godolphin, and if in real estate the golden rule is "location, location, location", in thoroughbred racing, it's "papers, papers, papers".

After her visit to the track vet, since this was her first race in France, her walk, rest, carrots, and getting dressed up in her owner Annie Casteu's colors, and another walk, it was nearly a half hour to post time. We'd been there for 3 hours. She returned to her box for a last quiet moment, received her racing blanket and Mark led her to the rond de présentation.

Annie had already gone to the owners' area of the grandstand with her friend to await the start of the race. I hurried along after Sunrise, Mark, Sebastien, and Gina, clicking photographs and making note of the events around me. The jockeys were there. Fabien materialized in the inside of the presentation ring, and he received information on Sunrise and directions from Gina. Only, being the first time Gina had raced Sunrise, there was not a lot of certainty in the directions. We were all here to learn. Fabien exited the inner area to mount Sunrise, Mark led them off to the track, and Gina and I headed up to the owners' and trainers' area to find Annie and watch the race.

Gina and Satwa Sunrise

A race, I learned, is over in the blink of an eye. Everything is possible in the training center, the van, the box and the presentation ring, but in the end, everything is decided by the events of a particular race: the track condition, the field of horses and how the jockey rides the horse. My eyes are still inexperienced. I can lose the horse I am following in the pack of horses straining to get ahead, for the lead. I hear the murmurs around me, the gasps, the encouragements, and the criticisms. We watched on the screen, and I saw when Sunrise was fully visible just behind and between two horses.

But, why wasn't she going? Was Fabien asking her to go? And then they were coming out of the last turn and into the straight, and the field broke into two distinct ranks, stretching the full breadth of the track. Eyes glued to the screen, I realized the consequences of what I was seeing; Sunrise was shouldered out of the front line and relegated to the second. Gina sucked in a breath and then groaned; her horse was stuck in the second line of horses with no eye to thread until just several lengths before the post. The only horses with a real chance came from the front line, although she was still passing horses on her way to and past the finish, and didn't hardly break a sweat.

Neither Sunrise nor Lucky Harry won, nor placed. I am learning that more often than not (at least it seems), the favorite doesn't win, and the finish to this race was a bit of a mess. Approaching the final straight, Sunrise's jockey, Fabien Lefebvre, pulled her up; she had been clipped in the rear hoof by another horse, and then the field of horses formed rank and closed her out.

Coming off the track

Sunrise finished 9th, classing, and Lucky Harry, at 7.2/1, finished 14th. It was clear that she could have done better. Should Fabien have checked himself from checking her? She wanted to go; she was pulling for it; and the hole was there, right in front of her. She raced in a country where you go from the start, like the States, and might not have understood that she'd have another chance to go for it, that she'd be asked to. Only this time, the only real opportunity closed in front of her and Fabien. And, what about the whip? I have heard the great woman jockey, Patty Barton, say in the PBS documentary Thoroughbred: Born to Run that mares don't like to be told what to do; show them the crop, but don't use it on them or they'll refuse. I have to make a mental note to ask Gina her opinion before Sunrise races again in a claimer Monday.

The claim that she was a bleeder didn't seem to hold much truth, either, as she didn't so much as clear her throat after the race, let alone cough, while her neighbor appeared to be practically drowning afterwards. A bleeder for sure. You wanted desperately to help the poor thing clear her lungs out. She couldn't even drink.

Still, like Gina said, Sunrise showed everyone a lot. She classed; she ran easily and well; and she recovered fast. I still like her. A lot.

In the meantime, we'll see what Deep will do tomorrow. He'll be running at 3:50 pm in the 6th, the Prix de Berd'huis, a 2400 meter handicap against a field of 4-year-olds and older. Deep's used to running in Marseille, so the competition will be stiffer than he has seen, but he's pretty full of it right now with some energy to spend.
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Colors

Deep, Magic and Milly

It is time to choose my colors. I know nothing about how this works in other countries, including my country of origin, but I am learning how it works here, how one goes about becoming an owner in the France Galop system. Like all things about which one starts by knowing nothing, it is not pour autant a secret. The site tells one how to go about it, in both French and English.

You do not need to be a resident of France, nor do you need to know anything about horse racing, although that is probably helpful, if you would like to recuperate any portion of your expenditure. 

You do need an income or assets, not necessarily wealth, although that is always definitely helpful (and appreciated), to pay the horse's keep and racing costs, or a part of them if you are an associé, or part owner with a leg, or two or three. 

You must also be a person of some moral decency, which will, in the course of things, be determined by the police and the Ministry of the Interior. 

You do not need taste, when it comes to picking out your colors, but it's always nice for everyone else, and your horse and his or her trainer.

And, you do, of course, need a trainer, but that's how I got myself into this, after all.

The colors and the patterns

France Galop offers you a palette of authorized colors from which to chose, as well as a tool to select different combinations of principal and accent colors and motifs. You are limited to two colors, but you may have three, exceptionnellement. Nothing, however, tells you anywhere what constitutes the grounds of the exception allowed. Perhaps you simply submit your choice and see what they say. If they are in a good mood, you get the exception granted.

This is la France, après tout.

As you work with the color tool, selecting various combinations, the system will tell you if the combination has already been attributed to an owner, and if so, who owns it and from what date. It will also tell you if the colors have been subject to a succession, if such is the case. I found that the combinations of red and black that remain available are severely limited. On the other hand, any combination of orange and grenat, or garnet, is. My chosen trainer is not partial to orange, however, whereas I am, and even painted an entire (small) guest room in  it, with the exception of one wall, and I would do it again. I do want my trainer happy, though, and I am left to suppose that she is not the only one in France who is left cold by the color orange.

I'll have to give Gina the other guest room, if ever she leaves Maisons-Laffitte to stay in MSX. For the moment, it is occupied by my stepson, anyway.

I believe I have made my choice, however, although I will not share it until the silks are made up, and my first jockey is riding out on my first horse -- or leg or two of one -- in them. My wish was for them to be simple, elegant, visible and to go with the coat of any horse I might ever be privileged to race and possibly see win, or place. I discovered, playing with the tool, that you know the right, or next best (you must submit three possibilities to France Galop), combination when you see it, and you can't help secretly hoping that those silks might one day be made famous by a horse of exception, which is extremely unlikely, although since the part of chance is always present in thoroughbred racing, never out of the question Like when the seventy-something-year-old retired high school principal Tom McCarthy's $17,000 horse General Quarters ran in the 2009 Kentucky Derby and came in 10th to Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Godolphin Racing's $2.1 million horse, Desert Party, who finished 14th in a 19-horse field. 

A note: Sheik Mohammed spends upwards of $45 million a year on horses. Tom McCarthy has precisely 1 horse in his stables on a 13-acre farm in suburban Louisville.

Gina is more along the lines of Tom McCarthy, a small outfit in a major training center. Her's is a "boutique" stable of fewer than 10 horses at the moment, focusing on the owners' experience and making the world of horse racing accessible to the biggest dreamers with not always with wallets to match, who came to their passion like nearly anyone with a taste for reading born after 1941, through The Black Stallion series. Talking the other morning with my stepdaughter and another pitchfork wielding owner at the yards, I listened to how he came to horse racing, and I was hearing my own story, separated by only a handful of years and an ocean. A little boy, growing up in France just before this little girl did in the United States, read about Alec Ramsay and Henry Dailey, come out of retirement to train a horse he knows is exceptional. 

A warning: Be careful what you read when you are a child, you might just live some aspect of it one day. Like my fairy tales, I married my French prince (désargenté, hélas), live in the French countryside with our black labs, and have frogs in a basin in front of the living room French door. I threaten regularly to kiss them. 


L'on peut toujours rêver de plus.

I wouldn't necessarily bet on a horse, but I will support a yard and a trainer's work, learning until I might (or might not) have the means to participate in the choice of the horse whose jockey will wear my colors and no one else's and win in them. For now, Gina goes to Newmarket and returns with 2, 3 and 4-year-olds, who, while they won't be candidates for the Qatar Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, can win and place regularly enough in smaller stakes races, and in order to do that, a trainer needs the support of owners who believe in the quality of her work and dedication to her horses and their owners, who get to simultaneously live their secret ambitions to be a first groom, or at least a lad, and take care of theirs and the other owners' horses.

It's a little scary, though. I know the value of money, the money I have earned, as well as the money anyone else earns, and I am learning about the risks of the thoroughbred stables: colic, viruses, and cracked foot bones that will put a horse out of racing for a race, several weeks, or even several months. If it's the "other owner's" horse, you feel sympathy for him, or her, or them, and for the trainer. If it's your horse, you take a big breath. There goes several weeks' or months' of fees, without any possibility to earn them back on the track, and maybe make a little something for your next horse, vacation or the entry addition to the house.

With all the best of intentions and practices, someone's horse won't be racing for some period of time at nearly any given time. There are no magic solutions or incantations, no silver bullets against illness or injury. One day, a given horse is fine, and you are looking to race her the next week at Deauville. The next day, you walk into her stable, and she is standing on 3 legs. When you move, you notice she hops on all three to shift position and you realize, "Oh shit, she can't put that fourth hoof on the floor," and you call the vet. An earnest roller after a work-out, she has slammed her hoof into the concrete block wall and fractured the third bone. A clean fracture the length of the bone without any displacement, anyway; she'll run again, and sooner than later, but she's out 4 months. That's Magic's story.


Time to open a Baskin 'n Robbins in Maisons-Laffitte.

It wouldn't matter if you had padded the walls; she'd likely have shredded the padding and hurt herself worse, possibly on a metal support beyond, like Hi Shinko did. It wouldn't matter if you have made the stables of rubber, which was the case when another horse, waking from the anesthesia after its gelding, somehow died in his box. Like Gina says, for such strong creatures, horses are fragile, "they will be walking and trip and break something, or walk into a tree and break something." A curious combination not only of strength and fragility, but of intelligence and silliness. 

If you are going to send your owner's application into France Galop, you have to be ready to take it all on, and know your limits. It's a little scary, but how will you ever know where you could have gone if you never begin?
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Maisons-Laffitte, la piste noire

A Brown Christmas and Sunrise on the Solstice

It almost felt like Christmas

Frost. There was frost on the field, on the fallen and unraked leaves, and on the tips of the Cape May Daisies that are still blossoming on the eve of the winter solstice. I meant to write about the discovery of the amaryllis blooming in the first week of December, but I never made the time. But, there is no more frost, just rain and sodden ground that squishes under your waterproof boots. The songs on the CD player sing of snow falling and Christmas "in the air", and I am remembering when this was true and Christmas felt snug and warm, anticipating the , last minute shopping and a hasty trip to FedEx before it closed, wrapping presents and midnight mass (not necessarily in that order) and the sand bag lanterns along the driveways and suburban cul de sacs to guide Santa's reindeer, flying through the night skies to land on the roofs of the houses, covered thickly in new-fallen snow.

This is not helping to get the tree decorated.

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Nor, either, is having my mind on Sunrise on the Solstice, tomorrow at Deauville, helping get the tree decorated. Tomorrow will be my first race, ever, in person, and not only my first race ever, but I'll be "backstage" with the trainers and the owners. And, not only will I be "backstage", I will be riding up in the horse van with Satwa Sunrise and her trainer, Gina Rarick. Sunrise will run in the seventh race, a claimer, The Prix des Perrets at 4:20 pm, and she'll be ridden by Fabien Lefebvre, who has ridden for Gina before. I have checked on the dress code; no trainers -- "or what we Americans used to call tennis shoes", not horse trainers (of which there will be lots), and no blue jeans. Black jeans are alright. I fear I am going to have to dress up, though, despite the weather forecast, which means the required rain gear would hide the color of everyone's jeans, since all my jeans are blue.

We'll have to see if my stepdaughter's stomach virus will have passed so that she can come, too, as planned. It's either the candy or the fish at her friend's house the other evening. If not, she needs to recover for the end of the week, because once Sunrise will have gotten some of her oats out on the track tomorrow, she's on to ride her in exercise.

Looking at the photo again, I realize I need to add one more thing to my list of things to do: rake. Christmas, and I am facing a carpet of wet, dead leaves. If the frost returns, it will have to do.

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Riding racehorses

On Strictly Rhythm

Saturday morning at Gina's yards in Maisons-Laffitte was one of those moments when you stop and realize not how far you have to go still, but how far you have come. In so many ways. But it is like that, when everything is a way to everything else.

Two years ago last July, my stepdaughter got on a pony for the first time, a Shetland, like all the kids do to start. Saturday, she mounted Strictly Rhythm, a 3-year-old thoroughbred racehorse, a filly by Hawk Wing and Esteemed Lady out of Mark of Esteem, who has placed in 7 of her 13 races over these two years. For the last year and more, she has been riding double ponies and jumping 60-70cm, although she has jumped more on occasion. In her two and a half years riding, she has gone from beginner to working toward her Galop 5. There are 9 altogether. To give you an idea, at Galop 5, you can join the mounted division of the gendarmes or the police. At Galop 7, you may qualify to teach, if I am not mistaken.

For anyone who doesn't ride and who may be excused for not realizing this, she has already progressed very rapidly, but to go from a double pony in a pony club, even a really good one, to a thoroughbred racehorse is like going from a Deux Chevaux to a Ferrari; you don't just show up at a trainer's yards and hop up into the saddle, and it's not for everyone. Nor do you earn your opportunity by mucking stables and greasing tack; you have to find a way to show the trainer that there is an excellent chance you can handle the horse, and yourself. First, there's the danger to you. Then, and very possibly more important to the trainer, there's the possibility of injury for the horse, a horse who earns money running, not recovering in its box.

For my stepdaughter, or ma belle-fille (it's so much nicer in French), the wait was relatively painlessly short and the way smoothed by a bit of good fortune. Gina was going to the farm in Normandy, the farm where Strictly Rhythm was vacationing, to hand a horse she was retiring over to her new owner, and we just happen to live a few kilometers from the highway to Orbec. Gina and I made an appointment to meet near the exit ramp of the highway, and we headed to la ferme de Madame Guibert, stopping along the way for Gina's usual "service station lunch".

It was only when we arrived near the farm at precisely the appointed hour and Gina called the girl to guide her the rest of the way, figuring she had to be nearly there and about to get lost, that we discovered that they were nowhere near. Her parents had hired a horse transport service, she and the driver had driven across half la France, and the driver had just stopped well over an hour away in Gaillon, at the appointed hour to meet in Orbec, for lunch, or to casser la croute.

"Je vais juste casser la croute," he said to Gina, perfectly nonplussed, "et puis on reprendra la route."

This is France. Nothing gets in the way of lunch, at lunchtime.

Just casser la croute and drive more than an hour and a half? It was 1 pm. They wouldn't be there for another 2 or 3 hours, and Gina was due back at 5:30 pm for evening stable. Seven horses would be waiting for her, so what the hell did he think he was doing, stopping for lunch an hour and a half away at the very hour they were supposed to be there? But there was more. The girl said that truck wasn't equipped for a horse. It was a stock transport truck.
"Stock?" Gina said. "Mais on parle d'un pur sang qui vient de terminer son entrainement de course!" A thoroughbred racehorse, who had just come off training. "Je ne peux pas le mettre dans un camion de stock."

The girl was in tears, stuck heaven's knew where for lunch with a driver who had just learned his empty truck would be turning around and driving back across France to somewhere nearly in Germany. I was imagining her sitting next to him in that cab for seven hours. Seven alternately silent and grumbling hours.

"Don't worry too much," said Gina, "kids today know better than ever before how to distance themselves. They all have iPods."

I imagined her slumped against the passenger door, pretending to sleep, music in her ears. It would have taken a lot more than an iPod for me to survive that at 18, even at well over 18, but we went to see Strictly Rhythm in her box and then out to see Clare, who is in foal, and we got back well ahead of time for me to go get my belle-fille from the pony club. Time enough, it turned out, for Gina to come up with me and see the place and say she'd like to see her ride right as Julie, the director, was walking by, said "Bien sur", and told my belle-fille to go get a helmet from the tack room. There was a lesson in the covered manege, and she could get on any of the ponies.

Well, you'd have thought she'd have jumped, squealing for joy, at the occasion, but that wasn't quite the way it went. I was ready to tan her hide; Julie ordered her; and, the girls in the lesson started to call to her to get herself in there and on a pony tout de suite. Here she wanted, hoped to ride for Gina, and she was dragging her heels. I was puzzled. I was vexed. Gina and I stood in the tribune next to Julie, and there she was trudging across the manege as though to the gallows, when a friend jumped off a pony and handed her the reins. She mounted. Gina watched, and she and Julie exchanged observations.

"Elle n'a pas la force de monter un pur sang cheval de course," said Julie. She doesn't have the strength to ride a thoroughbred racehorse.

"Il ne faux pas de la force, mais la main douce." You don't need strength, said Gina, but soft hands.

"Elle a la main vraiment douce," allowed Julie. She has very soft hands.

"Une plume comme cela pourrait être très utile," said Gina, watching all 38 kg of my feather of a belle-fille ride around the manege. "Ca va! C'est bien," she called out to her.

She'd ride for Gina, eventually, but it couldn't have turned out more perfectly. Alexandra might not have had her new mare in the truck on the way back across France, but my belle-fille had gotten a serendipitous audition.

Alone, later that evening, she looked at me and said, "Tu sais, j'ai monté le poney le plus facile."

"C'est pas grave, mais pourquoi tu as fais ça?"

"Parce qu'Alice avait besoin de faire pipi, alors j'ai pris Gladys. Et elle m'a dit que je suis folle; elle aurait sauté sur l'occasion de monter pour quelqu'un comme Gina pour la chance de montrer ce qu'elle sait faire."

I shook my head. Alice has more sense in hers. She probably made up the excuse of needing to run to the bathroom to get my belle-fille up on a pony as fast as humanly possible, and, was she crazy? She, she told my belle-fille, would have jumped at the chance to ride for someone like Gina and show her what she could do, all for a chance to ride thoroughbreds.

But, if soft hands are enough, it also takes assurance, maturity and confidence, but one way to develop all of that, and in spades, is to get up on that horse with blood and ride it, and Gina decided last week that Saturday would be the day. She asked me not to tell her, and we all kept the secret, the happiest of secrets to keep. My husband, too. I hoped it wouldn't give it away, asking her if she had her helmet and chaps leaving the house, but, I reminded myself, I have asked her the past three Saturday pre-dawn mornings.

At breakfast, she was willing to eat a scrambled egg with her cereal without milk.

"J'ai fais un rêve ce matin," she said.

"Un mauvais ou un bon?"

She had been in a miserable mood when I woke her up, smothered in the heat from the electric heater she'd turned up and left on full-blast, and she'd fallen back to sleep and then brought me up short for "interrogating" her upon awakening, for the second time in a half hour, when I asked her a question. Chastised, I had left her room again, hoping for the best on the morning she was to ride for the first time. I suspected a bad dream.

"Mauvais à la fin, mais j'ai rêvé que Gina m'a tendu Hard Way, et j'ai été sur lui, et il y avait beaucoup de monde. Lisa était là sur Vedette."

I smiled. She had dreamed that Gina handed her Hard Way, her favorite in Gina's yards, to ride, and there were many people there watching. Lisa, her friend from the pony club, was on Vedette, the Welsh pony she has begun to ride in competition. She didn't mention the bad end.

"C'est drôle les rêves," I replied, "Quelques fois on rêve le futur, son destin, l'où on va et ce qu'on veut. Toi, tu vas vers les purs sangs de courses, et tes amies sont toujours montées en poney."

She returned to her eggs and orange juice, and we headed out the door to her future, come as quickly as she could dream it. We cleaned boxes like every Saturday, and she brushed horses and greased hooves to get them ready to saddle; spread fresh straw; fetched hay and clean water, and then Gina came up to us where we stood near Hard Way, about to go out for his exercise.

"Ce matin, j'ai besoin de ton aide. Tu vas monter. Pas Hard Way. Il met son poids dans les mains, mais tu monteras Strictly Rhythm. Elle est gentille. Ca te vas?"

My eyes didn't leave my belle-fille's face. I wanted for all the world to have my camera in hand the moment Gina told her, but it would have been a dead give-away. Instead, I watched her. Her eyes opened wide and softened, she continued breathing, but a smile started to trace its way across her left cheek. She nodded.

"Tu as tes chaps et ta bombe, oui?" She nodded again. "OK, vas te préparer."

She headed into the tack room for her stuff, and I heard her call out to me, "Tu le savais, n'est-ce pas?" You knew, didn't you?

"Ahhhhh...!"

"Tu mens super mal!"

Gina looked at me over Hard Way and raised an eyebrow.

"Je n'ai pas menti! Comment j'ai pu mentir quand je n'ai rien dit?"

But, she didn't mean that I had lied before, of course. She meant I couldn't lie right then, about not having known, when there was no way I could hide the pleasure I took in being caught out, or the pleasure I took in watching her step up into the saddle.

"Tu es fière d'elle," I heard Thierry, one of the owners who lends a hand around the yard, say. Looking over, I saw him smiling from ear to ear. He's a father. I turned and glanced at the young woman from the International Racing Board, who had come out to see Maisons-Laffitte, and who had been riding her parents' race horses in England -- in her Wellies, no less -- "forever".

"Je suis heureuse," I said, turning to Thierry, and returning his smile, watching his eyes turn back to Capucine across the yards, "Heureuse qu'elle ait eu cette chance."

The young woman smiled, and we all turned back to watch her ride away out beyond the stables and out the gate with Gina.

"It went well, I think," said Gina while we were finishing up.

Later, in the car, I interrogated her for real, and she cooperated this time.

"Alors, qu'est-ce que vous avez fait?"

We rode into the park at a walk, and we trotted, and then Strictly Rhythm broke into a little canter, and Gina said she was trying to wake me up, and then we cantered, and she got away from me.

I knew that. She had already told me. When I asked her if she had gotten her back under control, she'd flipped at me, cool as a cucumber, "Well, I wouldn't be here if I hadn't, would I?" Cheek. So, it was good for her.

"Alors, dis-moi. Comment l'as-tu rattrapée?"

I pulled my shoulders back and stuck my feet out forward, toes straight up, like Gina told me, and I remembered, just in time, to lower the reins to the neck, like Gina always says you must. Never raise the reins, they'll go faster! Gina laughed. 

Phew, I thought.

I didn't ask if she wanted to ride again. That wasn't necessary to ask, but next Saturday, it might be off to the races at Deauville to see 2-year-old Surrey Storm, a Montjeu filly, run her first race in France, if she doesn't get eliminated. She has run four times in England and placed in three of those outings, two third places and a fourth, finishing at worst in eighth place. I might even put a fiver on her if she goes.


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