As people that actually know me will realise, I am a horse person first and foremost and all this other media and journalism stuff is incidental, at the end of the day I’m a rider, so with my two best horses in the ‘children left home era’ moving towards their twilight years I had to make a decision, do I gracefully bow out with them or find a younger horse to take me into my sixties?
I broached the subject with my daughter Jasmine last year after our darling She’s a Diva earned a ticket to retirement at age 20 following a ligament injury at the end of a long showjumping career with my kids. My other horse Pie is still at the height of his game, but at age 17 the writing was on the wall that if I want to continue competing at elite jumping shows I would need another horse.
Jasmine works for Chris Waller and has been there three years, so knows all the horses inside and out and said I will find you something… something special!
She had her heart set on Caulfield Cup winner Durston (GB) finding his place at Daybreak Farm, but when his owners elected to retire him to Living Legends another import came on the radar as a candidate.
Born in Ireland, sold in France as a yearling before becoming one of the best UK 2YO’s in 2020, New Mandate (IRE) even went to North America to contest the Group I Breeders Cup Juvenile Turf with Frankie Dettori to ride.
The horse that put his sire New Bay on the map, New Mandate missed virtually his entire three year-old season due to illness and then regrouped to win at stakes level again at four before his owners decided to send him to Australia where he won two more stakes races for the Waller stable.
He retired sound from racing and his Hong Kong based owner Marc Chan instructed the Waller stable to find him a good home and the rest is history!
“There are other horses with more talent, but he’s got the temperament,” Jasmine said.
“You are going to be handling this horse and doing it all on your own, so I’m not sending you a lunatic, it has to be a horse I know is a good horse that I trust.”
Jasmine made a good point.
All the other thoroughbreds we’ve had over the years, we’ve done together, the kids and I. There was always somebody to ride with, somebody to hold a horse so you could get on, help you load it on a float, somebody to pick up poles and video and help you do all the things that sometimes you just need a spare set of hands for.
The world of one out Wally is very different.
That said, after five months of steady work and getting to know each other, New Mandate and I went to our first show together last Friday at Albion Park.
He has a paddock name Dan the Man and it wasn’t just Dan and I going to the show, we also took our pony Friendly.
From the day Dan arrived, he has paddocked with the pony and they have struck up a good friendship, albeit not a stupid one as there are no attachment issues, they just hang out together.
Dan had not been on a float since he arrived here in September, so just loading him to go to a show was giving me some anxiety and here I will digress.
Racehorses are generally outstanding travellers and loaders, they learn the skills early in life and travel a lot in their racing careers, so 99% of them come out of racing perfect in that regard…. It’s the people that get them that stuff that up, especially inexperienced people that get nervous.
After my kids left home, one of the trickiest things about doing all your horse stuff on your own is loading to go to shows. I have a three horse angle load float, it’s big and spacious and there is plenty of room, but it’s still not easy to load on your own, get the divider in place and your horse tied in safely, even when you have horses you know well.
I had a few moments at the start even with Pie and Diva, but with time and practice you get good at it. Everybody has a different float and a different way of achieving the goal, but number one is don’t get flustered, sounds easy, but can be very hard, ask any woman that takes horses out on her own and she’ll tell you a float story!
Friendly knows the drill, he goes to Sydney all the time for shows with Pie, who is a notorious tantrum thrower at the float, so his job is calming influence and he is very good at it - other people might favour ACE, but I’m happy enough with Friendly.
When you arrive at a show for the first time with a thoroughbred, you need to get it unloaded, tied to float and settled ASAP when you arrive, so with that in mind I wanted to load Dan first at home, so he’d get off second at show and have his pony right next to him as soon as he hit the ground.
Happy to say, that all worked!
Saddling up and getting into the arena all went smoothly, which is not always the case. I had a Lonhro mare going back in time that I jumped and she was such a bitch to saddle at a show, I used to float her there saddled already for the first few months until she finally became more tractable to the great relief of my children!
The weather forecast last Friday would have put a lot of people off, but I remember Jasmine telling me about Dan’s very last race at Rosehill in July when she took him and it was a howling westerly gale. She said every horse was going ballistic in the tie up stalls, but not him, he never turned a hair, so that was always the least of my worries.
I had more concern over his actual readiness to compete as he had missed several proposed jump club outings in the past month due to wet ground and thunder storms, so to put it in racing parlance he was going out to race with no barrier trial.
Underdone, would be my assessment, so you worry about his ringcraft and mental fitness to concentrate on an unfamiliar task that requires a lot of thinking on his part and mine. Pie is a push button horse, Dan will be one day, but he’s not there yet!
Anyway, we got around! Three times in total, a 60cm round, then a clear at 75cm and one rail down in the jump off -it’s a start for what I hope will be an interesting year in showjumping land.
