How Many People Does it Take To Make A Winner?
Champion Thoroughbreds don’t just wake up one day, trot down to the track and decide to win a race. While there are certain horses born with champion potential, it requires a plethora of people to identify this potential, invest in it, work with it and ride it home for a win. Here, we explore the roles of three key players in the success of a race horse: the owner, the trainer and the jockey—and let us tell you, it’s definitely not all champagne-swilling, silk shirts and horse racing tips in the world of these people!
Owner
The owner or owners of a Thoroughbred are extraordinarily important when it comes to the success (or lack thereof) of the horse in races. Not only does an owner supply the capital to buy the horse, it is the owner’s responsibility to constantly inject funds for training, feeding, care and race entry fees. It is a huge financial undertaking, but money is not the only input that the owner has—far from it. It is also the owner’s responsibility to employ the trainer, another integral piece of the puzzle, and ultimately the jockey, though the owner often consults the trainer for this decision. Choosing the right people to work with a Thoroughbred is almost important as choosing the horse itself, so the owner’s responsibility is huge.
Trainer
The trainer is obviously another crucially important member of the team. While most people think that the most important role of the trainer is to work the horse into prime condition for racing, it is actually something far more instinctual than that. A good trainer needs to be able to see a horse’s individual personality—its strength, its weaknesses and the little traits that can be embraced to make it a winner. It is this ability to understand a horse that gives great trainers their edge, as they can then ensure they develop a training routine and strategy that plays to a horse’s strong points.
Jockey
He’s the man that gets a lot of the glory on race day, the pint-sized hero atop the Thoroughbred that rides home to glory (sometimes). The Jockey’s job is obviously to ride the horse, but, like the trainer, he has to have a deep knowledge of the horse he is riding and how to get the best results from it. A great jockey knows when to push and when to pull back, when to use his opponents to rile up his steed and when to avoid distraction.
As you can see, it is essential to any sort of success in horse racing that the owner, jockey and trainer have an excellent working relationship and communication. There needs to be cohesion between them, which is why one of the best racing tips we can give you is to look beyond the horse to the people that work with it—they will be a good indication of its chances of winning.
