Flemington teems with horses and big mosquitoes

Press, 22 October 1981, Page 22

Flemington teems with horses and big mosquitoes

By Peter Schumpeter, of A.A.P., through NZPA Melbourne

The day starts with a big yawn. It is five *m the morning and you are in the middle of Flemington racecourse surrounded by horses, jockeys, trainers, and big mosquitoes getting blood. , A mist begins to lift over the empty grandstands in the distance arid a full moon slowly disappears into the daybreak sky. “Give her a gallop over 2000 m, Wayne. Des, clock her over the last 600 m. Has anyone seen Ron anywhere?” The snappy speaker is the legendary Sydney trainer, Tommy Smith, , directing his squad of spring carnival hopefuls. The star of the team is the black superhorse, Kingston Town. Smith, unlijte most trainers at the track, is wearing a suit and one of his many hats and uses a walking cane, the result of a kick from one of his horses in a stable mishap last year. To the right and behind Smith is genial but pokerfaced Bart Cummings and to the extreme left is articulate Colin Hayes.

Together with dozens of other trainers and wellrugged jockeys the Big Three have risen with the lark to work and laugh and dream about winning a “big ’un” during the rich carnival. Smith, Cummings, and Hayes have a habit of forming a well-spaced triangle around an elevated viewing box with each of them having little, if anything, to do with the other in the way of serious talk or chit-chat during or after the morning’s gallops. But while they may never link arms and slap each other on the back, it is noticeable each has an ad-

miring eye for the way the other trains. About 500 horses are stabled at Flemington and nearly all of them are given track work on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The course has five tracks, made up like circles within circles.

The course proper is kept for race days and is not used for training except on the Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the week before the Melbourne Cup for the “Breakfast with the Stars” sessions.

It costs $2 to gallop a horse on the lush course proper. The two other grass tracks, Steeple Grass “A” and the Inside Grass, are open only on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings for fast work from 5 a.m. to 8 a m.

On these tracks trainers have to fork out 50c a gallop. The sand tracks “A” and “B” are open free between 5 a.m..and 10 a.m. every day.

The V.R.C. has two course caretakers on hand to collect the money. One of them, Jack, explains why the gallops have to start at what seems such an ungodly hour. Slapping at a team of mosquitoes which have marked him out for food, Jack says there are so many horses to gallop that you have to start early to get them all through by ten o’clock. ,

He says it is better to gallop horses in the-cooler morning conditions than run them on warm or hot afternoons which can do more harm than good. “The earlier the better,” he says, spraying a can of sect repellent over him and pondering on how the mosquitoes are bigger and biting nastier than last spring’s lot.

The track workout is the first big part in the day’s programme for a racehorse in training. On returning to the stables it is hosed down, dressed, fed, and has its stable cleaned out.

In the afternoon many trainers give their horses light road walks or swimming exercises for about an hour.

For jockeys and trainers it is also a pretty long day. “Getting up early doesn’t get harder with age, it’s always hard,” says the top Sydney hoop, Larry Olsen, here to ride Hyperno in the Melbourne Cup. “You don’t get paid anything for riding trackwork — you do it out of love,” he says sacastically, with his hard face and tired eyes saying a lot more. But there would be few or no rides for any jockey, no matter how good, who repeatedly tried to give trackwork a miss.

Olsen agrees that most trainers do not want much to do with a rider who shows a lack of dedication and willingness to take the rough of racing with the glamour. But what value is trackwork in helping to spot a winner?

Plenty, according to a long-time newspaper trackman, Des Spain, of Flemington.

“It's a good guide in that it shows you which horses are fit,” says Spain, who, working from the viewing box, clocks about 200 horses on Tuesday and Thursday mornings alone for the “Melbourne Age” and “Truth” newspapers. “That’s why the top trainers time their horses," says Spain. "But you can have the

fittest horse in the race and still get beaten on raceday because of bad luck,” says Spain. “Luck is everything in racing — everything.”