RaceHorseHeroes

jejquade · Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2009 10:09 am Post subject: It's all about the horses

The Times

Simon Barnes

The Cheltenham Festival thunders to its climax today. The period of ritual licence, England's four-day mid-Lent Mardi Gras, reaches its high point as the Gold Cup, the race of races, takes place across a cruel and majestic chunk of Cotswold turf, and the thousands there and the millions elsewhere will shout themselves silly as the hooves shake the earth and the mud flies and one supreme animal will show itself to be best of all.

What is it all about, this festival? What lies at its heart? Some will say money and betting, and they won't be wrong. Others will say drink, and they won't be wrong, either. Yet more will say partying and the intoxicating camaraderie of the punters' eternal battle with the enemy. And they will be right, too, but none of them will be right enough.

The heart of the Cheltenham Festival is not gambling and drink. It is horses. Horses are the sun around which everything else revolves. Horses provide the means, motive and opportunity for the straight forecast and the win Yankee, for the pint of Guinness and the bottle of Moët, for the commiserations and the celebrations. Without horses, none of these things would have the same fizz.

Some turn a cynical eye and tell us that the horses are just furry roulette balls on a spinning wheel of turf. That doesn't explain why we choose horses rather than any other gambling medium for a festival. There are a million different ways to bet, but we choose to bet half a billion quid over the four days, the average bet is £3.60 and William Hill reckons to take 2,500 bets a minute over a 24-hour period, and as much money, it seems, will be bet as last year, a recession-proof bacchanal.

There are a million more opportunities for drinking, but the Festival has a unique attraction for its devotees because it is centred round the glory, uncertainty, chance and what Anthony Powell called the boundless unreliability of horses. No horses, no Festival.

In National Hunt racing the horses endure from one season to the next and become well-loved characters in the drama: Kauto Star will be backed for reasons of loyalty and - let's call a spade a spade - love as much as good sense and calculation, while others hold an affection for last year's upstart winner, Denman, and will forgive his indifferent form because of a profound sense of identification with the horse.

Horses! How come they still exist? How come we haven't done away with them all together? It's not as if we need them. Ah, to go back a century or so and walk the streets of London, crossing only where the crossing sweeper has cleared the steaming globes from the roadway, when the ambient sound is not the thrum of engines but the battering of iron hooves on hard stone, when a gentleman in a hurry hired a Hansom cab - and a sovereign if you do it in ten minutes! - while others took the horse-drawn omnibus, when coal and beer and everything else went by wagon and all around a billion sparrows gorged on spilt grain.

Or to be in the countryside, to understand what an acre really means - the area of ground on medium-heavy soil that a horse can plough in a day, when agriculture was powered not by diesel but by rough pasture and oats and everything depended on the co-operation of a race of giants. I have driven a Suffolk (in Suffolk, where else?) and I know what it feels like. But these times have gone: how come we still have the horses? My grandfather was a sergeant in the Royal Artillery and worked with the horses that pulled the big guns in Salonika, Greece; his picture is on my desk. We no longer need horses to fight our wars, yet we still have horses. They fulfil no useful function. We can go to places more quickly without them, we can move goods more efficiently without them and we can kill vast numbers of people without ever going near a horse.

Yet horses are still part of English life, part of life the world over. Nor is it just the super-beasts who will fly the big fences today. There are horses everywhere. There are 1.35 million horses in Britain. Between 1999 and 2006, years of surveys run by the British Horse Society, the number of private households owning horses went from 900,000 to 1.2 million. There are 2.1 million who ride at least once a month and 2.2 million more who do so once a year.

This is clearly insane. If we could only apply a little logic, we would get rid of our horses in the name of efficiency, in the name of economy, in the name of self-preservation, in the name of common sense. Yet we choose to keep these animals: big, dangerous, expensive. They break your bones, they break the bank, they break your heart - yet we continue to keep them in prodigious numbers.

Horses are part of our evolutionary story. Much of our civilisation was built with horses. Horses were power, communication, speed, not to mention prestige. But now that horses have quite obviously outlived their usefulness, we have failed to let them go. It seems that we can't live without them.

This strange need for horses is stronger in some than in others. I suspect that horsemanship was one of the earliest specialisations of humankind. Not everyone gets the chance to locate his inner, atavistic, horsey self, but all over the country and, indeed, all over the world you find people who devote large chunks of their lives to an animal we no longer need. I have ridden horses on every continent except Antarctica. I plan to ride out on my Appaloosa-cross-thoroughbred mare once I have finished these words.

The fact that we refuse to get rid of our cavalry of galloping anachronisms is one of the most bizarre phenomena of 21st-century life. We can fly from London to Canterbury in New Zealand in less time than it used to take to ride from London to Canterbury in Kent. We can send a letter to every continent in a few seconds - yet there are still millions of horses in the world, and millions more fascinated with them. The question of whether Kauto has what it takes to make horsey history seriously matters.

We live in the heart of the civilised world. We have machines that can do anything. But still we insist on living with horses. What's more, we insist on keeping them a little wild. We breed them on the edge of tameability, for without a quantum of wild, a horse is worth nothing.

We must conclude, then, that civilisation does not fulfil all our needs. It seems that our wild selves cry out for release, and many of us find that release in horses. Horses free us from the concerns of everyday life by means of a four-day festival of wild excess, but they can also free us from ourselves, from the earth and from gravity itself. Humans could easily live without horses, but we're damned if we're even going to try.