U.S. TB owners don’t have a choice about that. The horses go where the trainer is. If your trainer stables at a place like Fair Hill, for example, you’re in luck. If they’re based at Santa Anita or Belmont, there’s nothing you can do about it.
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I finished up the book this morning, and read it on my kindle. About 68% through the book, as he was talking about his good sprinter, he mentioned how the horse came back from running his races with blood coming out of his nostrils. I can’t think of any benefit to having horses visibly bleed out the nostrils, and why this would be preferable to Lasix.
But of course. Even at the STBD tracks there is lots of jogging and training going on earlier in the day on race day. I’m well experienced with that aspect of the sport and the long days involved since most of the tracks we race at race at night. Nothing like dragging yourself into the office on Monday morning when the post time for your last race was 11pm Sunday night. Of course usually by the time you sent your horse out it was after that.
What I meant in my post was that we were there during the races so the only horses we saw out and about were either heading to the track, racing or heading back their stalls. 
We wouldn’t have been there before 9 because we were taking care of our horses about 2 hours away.
But you can choose your trainer…
Maybe I’m just lucky in VA, knowing several who run off the farm. These folks have well maintained training tracks.
It’s not for every horse but it’s a nice alternative to the racetrack setting. From my experience briefly sending a horse to train at the track, I won’t do it again except for getting a gate card or a short stay.
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We have no shortage of land in the United States. There is no reason we couldn’t shift to a training center model instead of a backside model. Places like Belmont or Santa Anita would certainly be tougher to figure out logistically than, say, Saratoga or Keeneland… but if cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong can make it work, I don’t doubt we could, too. Of course, we’d have to actually be serious about the idea, and I don’t see that happening.
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While you may say there’s “no shortage of land,” the availability of 150 tracts (that’s the size of the Middleburg Training Center) within reasonable distance to racetracks aren’t that common and aren’t that affordable. Marginal land at a better price? That’s going to be a solar farm in this era. Add to that the question of zoning, housing, and environmental concerns, and land DOES become an issue. Then comes the millions tied up in construction (track, housing, barns, etc) and what is deemed a simple idea becomes an investment that will never see a positive return.
At some point the bills come due and the day of people such as the Mellons and Du Ponts with their “eff you money” is gone from the sport.
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Good points. It costs a ton of money to maintain a track and training center. So instead of stabling for free at the tracks, trainers are having to pay a fee for stalls, which then gets passed onto the owner. And finding good help in some areas is an issue. The affordable land is far out, where no one lives.
Newmarket looks, at first glance, to be an ideal place to train a horse. But the wages paid to the help are not high enough to live off, and many struggle, even if they have staff housing.
See, this is why we will never change. Even those who tout themselves as “good horsemen” are completely closed-minded to the subject. Then you have thousands of racetrackers who know no differently and are inherently resistant to change.
My experience is atypical because I spent most of my career at Fair Hill and a few other smaller, local training centers. For a time, I was also based out of the private farm of the then largest racing stable in North America who raced almost exclusively off the farm. It was no big deal for us to send out vans every direction each morning to transport horses to run in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland.
Back in the 1990s, Fair Hill wasn’t the high dollar, luxury spot that it is considered today. Most of the trainers there were small time, Mid-Atlantic claiming trainers who got squished out of the local tracks by stall politics. Investors put up cookie-cutter barns and rented stalls to whomever. Back then, many would say it was both cheaper and easier to train out of Fair Hill because you could circumvent a lot of the bureaucratic red tape that was so prohibitive for smaller training outfits. A lot of those trainers became lifers when they realized the benefits they could offer their horses in such a place. A lot of those trainers have also gone from “nobodies” to almost “super stable” status because of the success they had as a result.
Today, it’s evolved into something totally different, in a good way. But the cost has become high because there are a number of prominent stables who have invested in state-of-the-art facilities of their own. These trainers/owners own their barns and every improvement they have made to the land they lease.
In my opinion, there is a middle ground that could be reached to improve quality of life for the horses without prohibitive costs. I’m further encouraged by the fact that the majority of countries with improved safety records to our own have adopted similar methods of housing and training racehorses. Comparing Australia and Europe to North America couldn’t be more different, but many of the Asian countries have successfully blended American-style dirt racing with a training center approach to conditioning. Racing is wildly popular in those countries, which provides the governing bodies with funds to support such facilities.
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I don’t think you were around Fair Hill in the 1990s galloping horses or we would know each other. It was pretty crappy back then, and it was not until they invested money in the facility that people like Graham moved there (I ran with that crowd in my younger days).
Before you assume people are “close-minded,” think of who is really footing the bills - owners. Owners are not making much money with current purses, and raising the cost of training is not something to be taken lightly. Once you get a few more decades under your belt and you’ve been smacked in the face by life a few more dozen times you’ll understand.
Texarkana, I don’t think I’m being closed minded at all. I too have experience not only racing off the farm, but also having to ship to Saratoga or Belmont just to breeze. I do, however, have an aversion to poorly conceived, “well all we have to do is this, this, and this,” comments without any critical thought as to the obstacles that have to be overcome–especially in regard to money.
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Maybe because I am a city girl who has had to make horses work in urban facilities that make purists shudder, but I am sympathetic to the status quo. Yes racing can organize itself around a rural facility that sprawls over rolling acres which is designed to allow turn out and open gallops and looks like Fair Hill or Payson Park but that is really just catering to hard core gamblers who don’t care if they see everything by simulcast and will make racing more of an abstraction for most people than it is already. The best ambassadors to the sport are not the trainers or jockeys or owners but live horses. There is a palpable difference when you walk into Del Mar or Santa Anita from suburbia outside. It is an attractive part of the sport.
Maybe I am sensitive on this point but I have actually run into people who look at the facilities in and around Los Angeles where ordinary people can own and ride and live in a suburban neighborhood and get to work by 9 AM as “cruel”. The argument goes that if you are not able to live and ride in the wealthy hinterlands or board your horse in a $2000 a month full service facility, maybe you just shouldn’t have horses and live here. After all, land is scarce and most horses stand in stalls all day, they get put on a mechanical walker and sometimes they get to relax in a dirt 20 x 20 sunpen. Sometimes the facilities are just small dirt rings or they have to cross a busy street to get to the trail. Sound familiar?
But writing off ordinary people with a passion who happen to live in the city for economic reasons is a bad idea I think and the horses adapt IME. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough and as On the Farm alluded to infrastructural changes are not cheap or easy to do.
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I recall an article I read some time ago, where a top STB trainer said that he would like to go to the TB sales with a good TB trainer, buy a horse, and condition it as he conditioned STB, then turn it over to the TB trainer to race. I never heard if such an experiment was ever done.
