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

My kingdom for a horse

A horse and a woman

It's incredible to me that I was able to write an entry about Satwa Sunrise without spilling ink going on about the way I feel about this horse. Feelings I trust because I discovered them slowly, watching Sunrise closely and waiting to see what I thought about her.

My first encounter with her wasn't like it was with any of the other 6 horses in Gina's yards. I had contacted Gina Rarick in part for my stepdaughter, and in part to inquire about her announcement of a partnership developing for this horse. I knew that going to Maisons-Laffitte I wasn't just introducing my stepdaughter to a possible position as "stable slave", and I wasn't going just to maybe make a great friend, I was going to -- eventually, at the right moment -- talk about ownership, although how I ever got the idea that such a thing might be possible for myself, I have no idea. I was following a hunch, and I tend to trust my instincts, fallible as they have been proven to be.

So, it was with particular interest that I heard that Satwa Sunrise was in that box over there, the first of Gina's out on the courtyard, after the 4 belonging to the neighbor. Next to her was Magical Flower, a younger filly, followed by the two colts, and then Triple Tonic and Gina's baby, Hard Way, in the barn. Last was the other Newmarket acquisition for Cagnes-sur-Mer, 2-year-old Surrey Storm, over by the yard owners' front door. I didn't make a beeline for Satwa Sunrise's box. It was only in the course of the morning, when Gina was getting her ready to ride out for her work, that I first approached her.

She was a big filly, or so she seemed to me. Gina confirmed it. She was easy to approach, calm. I walked around her and looked her over, ran my hand down her muzzle. Later, when she was back and the sun was fully out, warming the box doors on the northeast side of the stables, she and Magic stood there with their heads out, like sunflowers, eating their hay. It was harder to photograph Sunrise. Magic had better light, possibly better features, just a knot of white hair on her brow to Sunrise's flame. She wasn't a favorite. Not yet.

As the weeks went by, and I developed a little competence at basic yard duties, I came to have reason to go into each box and interact with the horses, delivering hay, topping up the water, cleaning out manure. Gina and I still hadn't talked more than passingly of ownership, and never of owning Sunrise's remaining two available legs. I was prepared to be patient. The horses and the other owners trusted Gina, and I liked her and her way of working; I figured I could trust to her methods in developing owners, too. Still, I talked to Sunrise a little differently, trying on what it might feel like to have a particular interest in her. She didn't come after me. She stood there and accepted my awkward embrace.

Okay, I thought, stepping back, feeling a little silly, I did that. I felt like a young teenage boy just after his first kiss, possibly wearing braces and glasses. Sunrise looked about as nonplussed as the object of such a young boy's interest probably felt. She might as well have readjusted her own glasses on her nose. She stood there and looked at me, not unkindly.

I found a nickname for her.

Good morning, Sunshine, I said. Other times I tried it this way: Hello, Little Miss Sunshine. She didn't seem to care what I called her. I knew it was for me.

I was still watching her. I didn't know her yet, but I was pretty certain I had reason to like her. It amounted to her presence, her way of going about her life in the yards and her work. She hadn't done anything really to distinguish herself, but I thought I was seeing something in her. If there were horses coughing, it wasn't her. If there was fever, she had none. She was said to be a bleeder, but she never so much as cleared her throat after a work-out, that I know of. She posed, in short, no problems, no real worries.

It was the first time I accompanied her to Deauville with Gina and Mark that I knew for certain, as much as anyone who actually knows as little as I do can know. It was watching her stride off at Mark's side to her box on the backside that I had my first hint; this is a racehorse. It was watching her walk around the exercise ring in the middle of our Maisons-Laffitte courtyard of stables that I saw her look at and see her world, including the people who are part of it, and I thought, She is intelligent. She is interested. She knows where she is, and why she is here, and it is good with her.

She held her head high and looked all around her. She stepped lightly at an athletic, wide-awake pace. And each time she came around to her corner of the courtyard, she turned her head and looked at her people: Gina, Sebastien, Annie, Annie's friend Denise. Me.

Yes, me. After all, I had known her nearly since she had arrived from Newmarket. I had helped to feed her, give her fresh water, and I had cleaned her box and talked to her, hugged her and offered her caresses, exchanged regards. I had admired her size and her strength, and her quiet, calm demeanor.

I noticed how everyone kisses and leaves a lingering hand on Sunrise. Mark while she was with the vet. Annie, when she offered her encouragement before heading to the owners' and trainers' section of the grandstand to watch her race. I noticed how gently she accepts her saddling, and how smartly she stepped out to the track.

"J'aime beaucoup ce cheval," I said to Sebastien, who has been around Gina's yards for years. "Je pense qu'elle peux vraiment faire quelque chose."

Sebastien had picked Satwa Sunrise out with Gina at Newmarket, but before the deal was sealed, he had found a thing or two to pick at about her. I couldn't find anything. Then, she ran a great race and acted afterwards like it was nothing. She'd only finished 9th out of a field of 16, but it wasn't her fault. Where were the problems? I was sure she was going to do something, if the next jockey let her thread the first hole that presented itself coming out of the last turn and fly.

She runs like a light bulb operated by a switch. Off, she is calm, gracious, alert. On, she runs like the southerly wind of which she was made. There is no fuss. Nothing lost. Everything with Satwa Sunrise is easy and easy going. If I had wanted two legs before that day, I had no idea until then what it was to want them.

We took her to Deauville again yesterday, and I fell hard for this horse. I fell for her watching Annie love her. I fell for her watching her let Alexandra walk her. I fell for her watching her nuzzle Alexandra's neck while she received her breast plate, race blanket and saddle. She watched everything; she watched everyone; and then, she walked out to race and ran from the southerly wind.

She found her eye in the needle this time, and Tristan Normand let her thread it, coming out of the last turn. He had kept her on the rail, and then the front runner on the rail began to fall back as she surged forward, and she tried to catch the number 10 horse, Counterbid, followed hard by three horses, nose to nose. The number 11 horse, Dolce Bambina, and her jockey made their bid, but were beaten by a nose by Sunrise for the second spot.

We were delirious, jumping up and down, yelling, Annie clutching her cane and beaming from Sunrise at the post to Gina and the rest of us. We hugged and kissed and trooped down the staircase, bathed in the sunlight that came out at post time after the early afternoon deluge. Unlike last time, when I had hoped for it, Sunrise made the sun come out, and Tristan's silks the color of sun and sky shone in it. Annie walked alongside Gina and Mark, and Alexandra leading him, still up on Sunrise, into the winners' enclosure.

"Qui l'aurait pensé? Ma Sunrise dans l'enclos?" said Annie, turning to me to share seeing the wish she'd made at lunch fulfilled, and I wanted those two long legs more than ever, but joked to Gina, "I knew you didn't want to give up your two legs, and I knew why last time." She laughed.

I didn't feel jealous, not even of the ones who had found their way to the guichet to place their bets for the win and the place on Sunrise. I knew they'd be turning their tickets in for more money than they'd handed over the counter just 10 minutes before. I wasn't sure how I felt about betting on the horse I accompanied to the racetrack.

Later, over champagne just before leaving the racetrack and heading home, I wondered aloud if it was silly only to want to feel the joy of them doing well and not having anything to else to gain, aside from the prize money eventually. After all, betting is allowed. It  brings money into the coffers of countries around the world, and it helps to pay the prize money. It keeps the sport fast turning big -- very big -- business going.

"No," said Mark, "it's a good attitude."

I wondered, and I snapped photographs of Annie beaming, Gina gratified. Genevieve, a breeder and friend of theirs, satisfied. Mark, well, Mark I remember his goofy grin, walking Sunrise around the exercise circle after her shower. Now I knew what Mark looks like when he is very happy with a horse, when his horse does well. I remembered Sunrise turning as Annie approached her, reaching into the pockets of her powder-blue wool coat, light blue and yellow colors in honor of her husband's city and happier days still, for the heart-shaped sugar she always remembers to bring for Sunrise, "I'm old-fashioned," she said, "I do things the old way."

Gina called out to Mark, who stopped and let Sunrise turn to Annie, leading her off the circle. Sunrise lowered her big head and turned her gaze to Annie's hands at her pocket, took her heart-shaped sugar and pressed her muzzle against Annie's palm. They stood there like that, and looked at one another.

"Elle les aurait pris de votre poche," I said to Annie as we walked away.

"C'est vrai! Elle le fait" she replied, nodding, and Mark walked back onto the circle, his hand on Sunrise's flank, a smile surely still on his face, the taste of heart-shaped sugar, near victory and steel in her mouth.
....

Mark and Sunrise, after her race

"When God created the horse, he said to the magnificent creature: I have made thee as no other. All the treasures of the earth shall lie between thy eyes. Thou shalt cast thy enemies between thy hooves, but thou shalt carry my friends upon thy back. Thy saddle shall be the seat of prayers to me. And though fly without any wings, and conquer without any sword." 

-The Koran Horse Prayer

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.


....

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.


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Sunrise

Satwa Sunrise

It's cold in late November at sunrise in Maisons-Laffitte. Almost as cold as sunrise in Argentière in January or February. Vapor billows around the horses nostrils and heads and off their flanks after their workout, and the low, golden sunlight makes it visible.

The work begins before first light and finishes at the lunch table, at home or at Le Pur Sang, full well before 1 pm, when a full work day is over. With 80-something lunches served before the hour was out, I missed the Lemon Ricotta Cheese Cake.

Oh well. I'll just have to go back.

This was our second week driving down the highway towards Paris, through Poissy and Maisons-Laffitte in the last dark of the night. I love getting up early with a purpose, being among the early risers, the first up and out. When we arrive, the rectangles of light from the box windows tell us we are not the first. We know we won't be, since we arrive at 7:30 am, an hour or a half hour after the lights are first turned on and the boxes opened. Curious heads poke out to see who has arrived. Vlad, the stable lab, trots over to say hello, and friendly voices add their own.

The horses have already gotten their first bags of hay, and Gina and Agatha are saddling up the first two to go out for their exercise. There are boxes to do, leather to be waxed, corners to be swept and mouse traps to be reset after I accidentally spring them with my broom, one after another, like popcorn popping. They all come up empty. Vlad has been efficient, but the evidence of their past presence is clear from the neat, round holes in the good wool blankets.

I pitch some soiled straw from the cleaned out boxes out behind the stables, and a small form darts into a hall in a particularly urine saturated pile that seems not to have been touched by the truck that comes to haul the old straw bedding away. A mouse. Gina tells me all the holes in the concrete block walls of the pit are mouse nests. I thought they were birds. Let the mice stay here, far from the good English wool saddle blankets and covers.

I think I am the only one who likes the dark, and the chance to watch the sunrise through the thickening morning fog and the horses' breath. Gina counts the days until December 21, and I tell myself Wait. Perhaps the charms are so many more once it is full light at the start of he work day in the racing stables.

Or, perhaps this charm wears off quickly.

Today, we saw Really Hurley and his jockey again. His jockey remembers us. He likes the camera, and I take more pictures and look up his racing performance when I have a moment the next day. I have some doubts about his being a crack, exactly. I recognize that I still need to ask everyone else's opinion on the matter. He is 6 already, although I have read that Steeplechase, or National Hunt in England and Ireland, horses are geldings and retire at an older age, so perhaps his best is to come. Really Hurley has run 36 races, with 3 victories and 9 places. In Quinté+, where the first five horses place, he has run 10, won 1 and placed 4 times. That actually gives him a pretty decent overall performance, winning or placing in a third of his races, and in half of the Quinté+ in which he has run.

I am starting to want better camera equipment. I had better find a winner to back, like Sunrise.


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Gina Rarick's yard at Maisons-Laffitte

Satwa Sunrise and her neighbors

Ever since I was a child, I have been crazy for horses. Like every other kid, I read all the books, Misty of Chincoteague, and everything else by Marguerite Henry, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara, and dreamed she was my friend, and The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley. It was Alec and Henry and their black stallion who captured my imagination more than any of them. I lived the races with them, and I dreamed of the racecourses down which the black stallion beat out his winning rhythm.

My grandparents lived outside a small city on the Saint Lawrence River in far northern New York State. Up the road were two farms. One in which my uncle stacked hay in the hayloft; the other more majestic. It was just  a little farther up the road and on the other side. The Carlisle's farm. They had horses, paddocks and a ring. My  uncle put a cushion on the crossbar of his red Schwinn bicycle and rode me up to the farm to play in the hay and maybe help me a little, but it was the Carlisle's farm of which I dreamed. We rarely went there.

I remember once, and I don't know how or why, being there with our mother with my sister. We each got to get up on a horse, our first time. I couldn't have been older than 8, my sister 5. I sat on that horse, facing the horse barn, and my mother said, "It's your sister who is a natural, not you." I was stung, but I did not want anyone to know. I don't remember anyone else being there to hear her words or to see my disappointment, but someone must have been holding the lead. That, or it was the gentlest, tamest old horse in the barn.

I supposed it was fair. I loved skiing and waited all the warmer months for the snow to fall, going down to the basement to look at all the ski equipment hanging from and leaning against the concrete block walls. My sister didn't. If she hadn't already, she would soon go out one morning, a blizzard blowing freezing air and heavy snow across the region, the Lake Effect, God love it, and declare to our father, "No. I am not going to ski," and she didn't. She turned around and went back into the lodge, where we found her for lunch. That was her last time to the slopes with us. So, perhaps it was fair that horseback riding was for her, but neither of us got to do any of it, anyway. It was inaccessibly far and expensive, and we each relegated horses to our dreams and met them in our books.

It was a couple years ago, when my stepdaughter was going through a first rough patch, that I asked her if she wanted to ride. Her eyes grew three sizes and her whole face opened in excitement. She nodded yes.

"Mais, Papa ne voudra pas."

"On s'en fou. Tu me laisse gérer Papa. Je veux bien pour toi."


Papa won't want me to ride. 


We don't care a fig about that. Let me take care of Papa. I want that for you. 


Her first session, that July 2009, she was timid, reserved, and absolutely delighted. They learned basic care of the ponies and led them to the paddock. Mounted them, and learned to sit, to hold the reins, to start and stop. To try to change direction. I had no idea where we were going and whether she wouldn't finally decide it wasn't for her; whether she wasn't too timid, afraid, finally. Several months later, during the winter, she had her first galop of the 9, like your first star in skiing, and Julie, the director of the pony club, told me very simply that she was gifted. her father was more restrained.

"On verra."

"Mais tu ne l'as pas vu monter et Julie a vu passer des tas d'enfants; quel serait son intérêt de dire une telle chose si ce n'était pas vrai?"

We'll see.


But you haven't seen her ride and Julie has seen tons of kids; what would be her interest in saying something like that if it were not true? 

Still, he demurred, and his daughter continued to pass her galops "au galop". The second, the third, the first part of the fourth last winter, a year and a half after she had first gotton on Frimeur's sturdy back. She as jumping, and she had competed in her first unofficial competitions without ever losing a huge smile on her face. Jumps, speed, nothing made her afraid. It delighted her. I brought her father to see Julie with me, and she told him, "Votre fille est douée."

Your daughter is gifted.

The French respect what they consider expert opinion, even if we were not seated in front of the director of the national team. At this level, it was enough. He started to come to see her jump, and he realized: she rides beautifully, with grace, composure, assurance and joy.

If I were never going to ride, she would ride as far as her talent and ambition, and our means, stretched, could take her. Not that she didn't want me to ride; when she started, she offered me a crop. It sits at the bottom of the stairs, with the unused backgammon set, a box of bills and my stable boots. I got those a long time ago for walking the dogs, working outdoors and general wearing when I don't particularly care about my elegance, or most of the time. I have made progress, though. I now where Ugg boots for that.

Two weeks ago, Julie scheduled her to finish her galop 4. It was way past time, and not liking dressage is not reason not to pass it, and a little before then, just before the Breeder's Cup, I saw the New York Times was starting their blog, The Rail, again and looked it over, including the contributors. Imagine my surprise when I learn that one of them is a woman, a professional thoroughbred racehorse trainer at the Maisons-Laffitte international training center, just outside Paris, and that she is from the United States. Her name is Gina Rarick, and I sent her an email through her blog on her site, GallopFrance.com, and, she replied. We were welcome to come to visit her and the yard, and, better still, she had had a number of girls my stepdaughter's age work with them and it had always worked out beautifully.

We went to see Gina and the horses and everyone who works with her last Saturday morning, but that's another story, for another post.

Meanwhile, I have been back to help muck out the boxes, clean up the hay and straw storage rooms for a delivery -- I got rid of as much cough and respiratory problem-inducing dust as was humanly possible; horses are meant to run, not stay home with a cough --, and feed and give water to these gorgeous creatures: Satwa Sunrise ("Sunrise"), Magical Flower ("Magic"), King Driver ("King"), Deep Ocean, Triple Tonic, Hard Boy and Surrey Storm ("Milly"). And I acquitted myself decently.

My stepdaughter will be returning every Saturday morning to help out, and eventually to exercise the horses, if she is ready. I am in training for the 5:30 am weekly Saturday morning alarm, in addition to the ones that will ring Sundays for competitions.

Right now, I need to hurry up and get ready to meet Gina over near the highway to Horse Breeding land, Normandy. We're going to the farm where she rests her horses to meet a young woman coming to take one she had to retire and is giving away in exchange for a good home for her.

As for me, I might not ride, but, who knows, perhaps I will invest in a share in a thoroughbred.
....