THESE can be difficult days for both jumps and flat jockeys. You wait patiently for your agent to ring, you hope that you’ll be busy. It is difficult because your mind is working overtime.
Being honest you assess every opportunity that is presented to you. Personally I never like to say no which can be to my detriment. I am willing to travel; I don’t ever want to miss a chance. You only have a certain time as a jockey so you want to get every last drop out of it.
What is worrying, though, at the moment is that the fields in races are reducing all of the time. This is down to a variety of factors. Most of the established trainers have such large and powerful yards now it is hard for those operating on a smaller scale.
The big yards just seem to be getting bigger. The small yards seem to be getting smaller. That is just the way it is at the moment. It has a knock-on effect for jockeys, who want races and rides.
Looking at the figures of the amount of horses being sold and bought there should be more horses going to the tracks. Of course it is tricky for trainers who want to ensure their horses go to meetings with the best possible chance of claiming winners.
Even now some smaller yards are being forced to run a couple of runners in different races simply because horses mightn’t get a chance to get to a track for several weeks. It can be tough for jockeys, and I have preached about this in the column before. The whole issue of race planning is a little up in the air for everyone.
I absolutely accept that it is hard to cater for everyone. I acknowledge that, but from a jockeys point of view these weeks can be head wrecking.
One thing which has encouraged me, though, is that there has been a good reaction to the column on social media lately. I think racing in general could use things like Facebook and Twitter better to increase awareness and activity in the sport.
Last week I put up a Facebook link to one of the columns and it was lovely to read comments from people saying that they enjoyed the read. People probably are used to hearing about the high end jockeys, who are very successful riding for the big yards so I think they liked to see what it is like for those of us going about our day to day grind.
In the future I’d like to see those involved in racing interacting more and using these things because they are very beneficial. It is brilliant to read some nice words from racing enthusiasts on my Facebook page.
