Elbow Beach is here

There's no place like home, away from home

Elbow Beach has arrived at Gina's yards, and, may I say, I think she finds it quite to her liking. What is not to like, for this 3-year-old gray filly, on the cusp of being a mare? As Chantal pointed out, she is among women, if you don't count Vlad.

I missed her moment of arrival. I was dragging; a morning spent recovering from the agonies of step issues, into which I have stepped not lightly, and those of committing to my color choices (three, prioritized); even the man at Petitpas tack shop in Maisons-Laffitte said it is something you only do once in life. I sent off a message to Gina, suggesting we take the dogs for a walk in the training center, fretting about the loss of the best light in which to photograph the newest arrival, a loner horse.

Her trainer in England plans to breed her. She has an good paper, a filly of Australian stallion Choisir out of Impulsive Decision (and she has been mine); all that she needs is a win to increase her value as a stud mare, and she has come to France to get a jump on her 3-year-old season, racing the winter in Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Not just the English, but their horses, too, descend on the lovely Côte d'Azur in the bleakness of January and February. Or to the Alps, but that is less advantageous to thoroughbreds.

"Your horse," said Gina, "is over there, in the 'quarantine' area."

My horse. It could make your head turn, just a little. Over there, across the yard, in one of the usually empty stalls, was Elbow Beach. The whole yard was in darkness, lit by the barn lights where Hard Way and Triple Tonic have their boxes, and by a subtle moon. It was a quiet, peaceful January evening, just cool. The winds that had delayed her arrival by several days had left perfect calm in their wake.

I didn't hasten across; there were my old friends to visit in their boxes first. I began with Satwa Sunrise, spotting the dark form of Alexandra, returning from the manure pile with the wheelbarrow, coming toward me. It seemed almost indecent to break the quiet. I walked over and spoke softly to Sunrise, who raised her head from her hay, and moved toward me for a greeting. And then Magical Flower, still recovering from her fractured foot, Deep Ocean, Strictly Rhythm, Triple Tonic and Hard Way, Milly, or Surrey Storm, and then I made my way over to Elbow Beach.

Whether Gina knew that I had finished my rounds, or whether it was a coincidence, she called out to me, and we all headed over to see Elbow Beach, Gina, Lisa, Chantal, Vlad and I. Elbow, or Elbé as I had begun to think of her, made room for us all.

She had traveled all night, arriving from the stud where she had waited out the storm by truck and ferry. This evening, she stood in her box, content, wrapped in her blanket, standing in clean shavings, a pile of fresh hay in the corner. Gina went for clean water and then took her blanket off to show us her form and her musculature. Chantal and Lisa trained their keen eyes on her.

I wouldn't have noticed the lack of "top muscle", along her back, but my eye could see that she had hollowed out between the barrel and the loin. Gina nodded, her hand had already moved there. Lisa  spent some time checking out her forelegs; Gina found them a little straight. All in all, she concluded, she's not too bad for having come off training in December and spending a week in the horse walker at a walk and a trot. Elbow Beach is a sprinter, 1300 and 1500 meters. Gina thinks she'll build back up to race form fast enough.





What we all noticed was her curiosity. Nothing went unexplored, from her blanket, let dropped to the floor of her box, to Vlad, the stable lab, and to each of us. She pressed her muzzle into my hand and my shoulder, as though she had returned to me after a regretted absence. We had never met. She looked each of us over, nuzzled us, and found us to her liking, and returned to nibbling on her shavings.

"Elle va bien dans la tête," said Chantal, nodding.

"Le monde lui va," I agreed.

We left to prepare the pails of feed for the evening, and Alexandra picked up two, Gina two more, and I reached for a couple.

"Laisse la prendre le sceau pour Elbow Beach, son cheval," said Gina, in French for Alexandra.

"Je lui donnerai la moitié de ma part et l'autre moitié de la part de Kay," I said over my shoulder, heading out past Hard Way and TT, but the words "son cheval" did not displease me. I decided to go ahead and savor them for as long as they will last, until the end of February and the winter season at Cagnes, or perhaps after a race or two in March at Saint-Cloud or Chantilly, and headed over to feed Milly first, and then Elbow.

She had left her carrots, apple quarters and the corners of her manger full of oats. I called across to Gina. I thought I had heard her tell Alexandra to clean out what she had left from today when she fed her in the morning, but I wanted to be sure. I stuck my head out the box door and called across the yard in the quiet, early evening January darkness, broken clouds partly covering the moon. Figures moved about, here and there. My voice rang out in English, and the sound of Gina's, returning through the dark, seemed almost a comfort. Leave them, leave them until tomorrow.

Leaving for our errands and evenings with our families, Gina hurried to catch the garbage truck, due to pass, and took advantage to say once more to me, "Could you close your horse's box door?"

Of course. Of course I can.

This time, I hurried across the grass in the center of the yard, and when I went to pass the hook in the lower door through the eye in the upper door, I could hear the sounds of her eating her first dinner in France, her large, dark form against the side wall of the box. I slid the hook into the eye, and hurried to join the others.

Tomorrow, Deep runs again at Deauville.
....

Elbow Beach gazes at her new home

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?
....

Maisons-Laffitte, la piste noire

A mint chip milkshake for Magic

That's Magic in the 5th position

She's right behind number 12, the 5-year-old Glorieux Gaulois at the outside fighting for second, and nose to nose with the number 17 horse, the 5-year-old Sabantuy. Her jockey is wearing the blue silks with the white shoulders and white helmet cover.

I was like the mother of a 6-year-old at a soccer game, right after her child has learned where the ball is supposed to go, but still hoping for that first goal. The start time, 4:10 pm, approached, and I grabbed my camera.

I do nothing important without my camera in hand. It might not or ever have existed if there are no pictures to show it.

The commentators on Equidia told us all about the horses considered to be favorites, while Magic quietly took her place in the the stalls. I saw her go in on the TV. No fuss. No bother. I waited while the others took their places, and then there was the moment of preparedness before the gates opened and the horses burst out onto the track. I had accomplished nothing all day, aside from careful perusal of the race lists and the prognostics by the experts on the different betting sites, who was favored, and maybe why, and then how they actually did. I discovered that the favorites weren't close to winning most of the races; the outsiders were taking the victories, and the horses placing were as often as not not even on the list of those with a solid chance, "if this" or "if that", like "if the truth were to win out over fiction".

That reorganized my thinking about Galixi fast enough, but who then? Who had a chance in this race? I didn't know enough to begin to guess it, but the way things were going, the horses winning and placing were in the 15/1 - 20/1 odds range. They weren't favorites, but they weren't long shots either.

The stall doors opened, and the 20 horses on the field for this 8th and last race of the day at Lyon-Parilly were on the track. It was happening. Just like that. The event I had been awaiting all day had begun, and it wasn't going to be long before Gina, Agatha, her jockey, Frédéric Spanu, and Magic's owners knew what she could do on this day, at this moment in her life, and at this point in her own particular career, with her papers, what she could do on this terrain heavy as lead, pénible by all accounts, on a gray day in late November, the end of the year.

But, there she was, with the leaders. Commentators who it seemed did not think they would be needing to say "Magical Flower" much, if at all, were suddenly saying her name often, "Et Magical Flower est là avec les chevaux en tête... Magical Flower est toujours là...".

She was. I saw it through my camera lens. She was right behind the first three, pounding down the track next to the horse nose to nose for 5th, until the surge in the final straightaway. More than two thirds of the race, even three quarters up with the leaders. I let the camera slip and gasped. And then she started to lose ground. The horses right behind her surged forward and past her, one and then two, three, four, five. "Magic! Allez, Magic!"

There was no point, though. They were bearing down on the post, and she had lost her position. She wasn't getting it back now, and it looked like she had decided to hold the door open. The leaders fell behind, and at the finish line, it was all 8-year-olds: Arwad, with 15/1 odds, Forza Atina at 13/1, Jolinoor at 14/1, and Space Tune, a 7-year-old mare, considered a solid chance for a win at 7.2/1, and then a 5-year-old, Sabantuy, a British horse at a long shot for the win at 48/1. Galixi, the favorite for the win, didn't even place.

Just look at the records of those first five horses, with 45 and more races for the older ones to Magic's 5 races before yesterday, with a place. Two words: experience and strength, and in those wet, heavy soil conditions on a grass track, both count.

Still, I wished she liked mint chip Baskin 'n Robbins milkshakes, and that I could stop and get her one on the way home, like I used to do with my son after soccer, to celebrate or to cheer up, except it wasn't Magical Flower who was disappointed; I was. Just like the mom I am. I realized I am going to have to rethink a few things if I am going to invest in "a leg or two". One is that you don't always get to win. Most times out, you probably won't. You'll see the legs you own on a beautiful creature walk up into a van and make the trip to Deauville, to Lyon, to Cagnes sur Mer, to Chantilly, Longchamp and Saint-Cloud, and possibly head to the shower before heading up the ramp to the van and on home to a clean box, without so much as a place. Another is that maybe you will have to acknowledge that your horse isn't going to have enough of a career, for one reason or another, to keep at it. Better to call it a day, offer him another life, and move on as much as you want to win.

But we all want to win. We all want to see our horses, like our children, bring home the glory and the ribbons and the trophies, exult with them and everyone who had a part in the training, the driving, the cold and the wet, when they win, but there will be colds and coughs, colics and splints, bad track conditions and long distances to travel, decisions to geld or to wait, hope and work and disappointment in the preparation for victory. And like all else, one has to imagine oneself, like Sisyphus, happy, and love the horses and the work, suffer the cold sunrises and the scorching June afternoons, and learn and build one's stables.

Gina saw that I noticed the ages of the horses who won and placed yesterday and chuckled. A "newbie", she said, wouldn't necessarily see that. She noticed it, too. I wondered about the young ones racing against the veterans, and she wrote and said it herself, "I'd rather keep them in their age category as long as I can -- usually until late in their four-year-old season. But at the end of the year, we take what we can get."

Like we all do at the end of the day.

Magic didn't break a sweat, though, and she could have blown out the candles on my father-in-law's birthday cake. When the horses behind her began to overtake her, it was like she saw them coming, held the door open for them and said, as Gina put it, because of course she and Frédéric saw it, too, "Well, go ahead then, if it means that much to you...". That means a change of strategy, longer distances and starting out front and asking her to stay there. Please.

Next up, Satwa Sunrise, a horse in which I will be taking a couple of legs, if France Galop and my husband are cooperative, at Deauville on December 7th. But with 134 other horses in the list, she's a candidate for an elimination. If she is, the 8th is a possibility. And this time, I will move heaven and earth to be at the rail.


....

Race Day

Magical Flower and Satwa Sunrise at canter

It's race day at Lyon-Parilly for Magic. She'll be wearing the number 10 and the start for her race, the Prix de Pont de Vivaux, is at 4:10 pm. Right now, she's in the van, on her way down the A6 from Maisons-Laffitte to Lyon, with her trainer, Gina Rarick, the only American woman trainer working in France. The jockey, Frédéric Spanu, is already there. He'll be racing the number 10 Chopouest, given 20/1 as an outsider against the favorite Kolokol at 5.6/1, in the Prix la Flèche, the third race of the day. Today is the first time ever that I will watch a race and know the horse and her trainer.

I am learning. Like with anything, there is a lot to know about racing and each particular horse before one can open one's mouth and say anything pertinent, let alone intelligent. If I had more time, I'd look up every horse in the field, a big one with 20 starting, but I'll start with Magic and the race favorite, Galixi, a 6-year-old mare from the stables of Jehan Bertran de Balanda.

Magic is a 3-year-old filly by Oasis Dream out of Fancy Rose. Oasis Dream is one of the best stallions in Europe. She has her chance. Geny.com likes her overall, but at small stakes. She placed 5th at Argentan in early October, in a slightly longer race on about the same track conditions as the last report for Parilly's grass gallop track. Her trainer hoped for a little more training time, but Magic didn't get scratched like she expected she would, and off they go.

She's currently at 23/1 at the PMU, but I am not giving up on her. She's young, racing her second year, and in her 12 races to Galixi's 62 she has 5 places, while Galixi has 8 wins and 27 places in her 5-year career, but there's always a first time. Magic's a beginner with promise, learning her trade, next to Galixi's glory.

I have organized my day around this event (and my back, which I threw out again last week), even though she is neither my horse, nor a horse in whom I have as much as "a leg". But I know her, and I know her trainer and her exercise jockey, Agatha, and that's just as much.
....

Magic