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CONCERNING JOCKEYSHH IN ENGLAND Though his remarks are somewhat scathing no one who has had the misfortune to watch the major ¬ ity of our modern artists of the pigskin will be found to disagree with a writer hi a contemporary that just a brace of them are worth retaining fees and the remainder for all the use they are might as well be dead and buried The writer in question urges that owners should form themselves into a sort of trade union and refuse to subsidize the ser ¬ vices of our present jockeys with unwieldy retain ¬ ing fees fees which have been directly responsible for the swelled heads with which nine out of ten of them are badly afflicted This is essentially an age of heroworship and jockeys come in for more than their fair share of It The natural result has of course been that quite a number of them have com ¬ pletely lost their mental balance and have come to regard themselves as the beall and endall of mod ¬ ern racing It is not their fault it is their mis ¬ fortune The blame lies at the door of the press and what the sporting writer in a weekly journal delights to call the gullish herd who by heaping fulsome praise upon the boys have caused them to acquire an exaggerated idea of their own importance Barring Maher and Wootton it would be difficult to name a jockey riding at the present day who could be truthfully described as a horseman Quite a number of people appear to imagine that the titles horseman and jockey are interchangeable interchangeableQuite Quite the contrary is the actual fact Any man who has served an apprenticeship in a racing stable without any stain on his personal character and who can afford a subscription of a sovereign to the Ben tinck Benevolent Fund can become a jockey but it takes something more than this to make a man a horseman The fact is that at the present time the majority of our jockeys lead a life which is wholly incompatible with success in their profession and it they have to waste get it oft In Turkish baths The oldtime jockey shed his too too solid flesh along the roads His nerves were like steel The modern jockey starts at his own shadow shadowAnd And in the matter of ability the pre entday jockey cannot compare with the men who battled out the close finishes in the brave old days of old He sits all wrong to begin with He is obsessed with a foolish idea that all a man has to do to acieve fame in the pigskin is to pull up his leathers a ridiculous number of holes and get his hands as near his horses mouth as i ossible He has less than no judgment of pace at all his one idea being to get off in front and stay there In his fatuous folly he fondly im ¬ agines that these tactics are what Tod Sloan called waiting in front frontHe He possesses the ambition and selfassurance of Sloan without a tithe of his ability Putting all per ¬ sonal prejudices on one side one cannot rate Sloan as anything lower than a genius He was the Archer of the American turf but there can be equally no doubt that he and his style have proved the curse of modern racing A genius is a law unto himself He rises above all ordinary rules It is the people who imitate him and imitate him unsuccessfully who cause the trouble What is the remedy for the existing state of affairs I may be wrong but it is my firm opinion that unless and until we revert to the old style of riding races we shall be able to boast of few jockeys upon whom we can abso ¬ lutely rely The American seat at lts best must always be a fruitful source of trouble Even in America they now admit that it leaves all sorts of things to be desired Sloan in his prime could never hold his own with an English jockey in a close finish The other day as a matter of curiosity I turned up the Calendar of 1S99 and 1900 and traced out some of the head and neck finishes in which the wonder ¬ ful little Yankee participated Queerly enough he seems in most instances to have run up against Sam Loates when it came to a close finish After pro ¬ longed research I am only able to fine one case In which when 4hey raced home head and head the nose went in favor of Sloan a pretty sure indica ¬ tion I should imagine that when it comes to fin ¬ ishing the English style is the best bestAnd And if you will only just give the subject a minutes serious consideration you will surely come to the conclusion that the finish Is at least as im iwrtant as any other part of a race Where there is a close finish nowadays what do you see Do you see flagging horses beautifully nursed and held together for the one long run which is to snatch a seemingly unattainable victory on the post No More often tliaii not you sec horses straying about the course Hko lost dogs and as sure as one of them is distressed there is a swerve and a bump which more often than not puts paid to the account of some unfortunate animal whose only desire Is to be allowed to run his race out straight And then they call it bad luck I do not I call It downright hart jockeyship and you can see your fill of it every half hour of every afternoon upon which there Is racing Augur In London Sporting Life
