| RACING |
Denise Steffanus Shutterstock, Eclipse Sportswire, Dr. Chuck Jenkins
PR AC TI CAL T IP S F O R I N T E R N ATI ON AL T RAV E LS
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orses thrive on a daily routine and do their best when racing in a familiar environment, like a sports team with homecourt advantage. But more and more American trainers are trying their hand at racing abroad, in places where racing is very different from what their horses are accustomed to. Racehorses in Europe don’t live and train on the racetrack. They are stabled at training yards, similar to a trainer’s private farm in America. Riders hack the horses to grass gallops, sometimes through the nearby town, to get their daily exercise. It is a relaxing, pastoral setting.
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TRAINERMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 47
When the horses head to the races, they are vanned from the training yard to the racetrack. The disadvantage for an American horse racing for the first time at a European racecourse is it doesn’t have the opportunity to train over the track. So on race day, the horse finds itself in strange surroundings without the security of a lead pony, which are not customary in European racing. Eoin Harty is a fifth-generation Irish trainer now based in California. Under his tutelage, Bill Casner’s Well Armed dominated the Group 1 Dubai World Cup in 2009, winning by 14 lengths, the largest margin in the race’s history.
Harty described the scene at England’s famed Newmarket. “The town is just basically around different training establishments,” he said. “When you go to the track, you might be driving through the town and there’s 50 horses walking on the street beside you, and I mean literally walking on the street. Then they just turn off and they go gallop up a hill somewhere. Then they walk back down through the middle of town and go back to their stalls. It takes a little bit of getting used to.”
Racetrack configurations
Racetracks in America differ greatly from those in Europe. Here, horses travel