Calling The Race

This week, in rural England, a group of very short men stood by a highway dressed in body-hugging silk breeches, bright silk shirts and multi-coloured silk caps. They were busy nattering away into their cellular phones….. and looking ridiculous.

These men were jockeys. And this was a demonstration against a new rule that bans English jockeys using their own cell phones when they are meant to be racing horses. They'd walked off the racecourse, near the English city of Leicester, protesting. And there they stood, like a bunch of tiny clowns gabbling away into the ether.

Now on the face of it, this ban is pure common sense. I have ridden a horse – slowly – several times. I have fallen off, several times. I couldn't contemplate using a cell phone while bouncing up and down at ninety miles an hour on the back of a homicidal four-legged thoroughbred foaming at the mouth to reach the finishing post.

But English jockeys are different. They're desperate to keep in touch. They're quite prepared to stay an extra fifteen minutes in the steam room sweating off the extra weight of a cell phone – just so they can call their girlfriends before the starter drops the flag and yell: "I'm on the horse!"

English jockeys, you might well conclude, are slightly mad. Successful English jockeys, on the other hand, are also very rich. And there is a rumour that some of them aren't entirely concerned with the honour of racing.

A suggestion - you didn't hear it here, of course - that certain jockeys might be placing last minute cell phone bets……and who better to know which horse will come first or second than the men in the saddle? That's why Britain's governing body of horseracing is digging its heels in and cracking the whip. But the jockeys have now got the bit between their teeth.
We could be facing an all-out strike.

What's needed, if you'll pardon the expression, is a little bit of old-fashioned horse sense.
By Ed Boyle