Fairview racing gone with the wind

There’s a lot of hot air in horse racing. Opinions and arguments – even the loud shouting – is part of the game’s DNA. But when nature cuts in to have its say, things can veer off course.

Strong winds brought a premature end to the race meeting at Fairview in Gqeberha on Monday, with jockeys saying they feared being unseated and injured as 50-70km/h gusts swept across the Polytrack.

Some observers reckoned the funneling effect of wind between the grandstands pushed up the speed as high as 100km/h.

“Wind stopped play” is not a common thing in South Africa, which is probably why some frustrated punters started cranking up the old chorus about jockeys being wimps and not as professional as their overseas counterparts.

Global phenomenon

The truth is that blasts of air hitting horses in the finishing stretch were blowing them off their chosen galloping paths. Even on TV it looked dangerous. Jockey Craig Zackey – who won three of the four races completed – said: “The wind is really strong out there and as you turn for home the wind is blowing us straight to that inside rail.”

Wind blowing racing away, while uncommon, is not unheard of globally.

A quick Google search reveals meetings being abandoned due to high winds in recent years in Australia, Canada, the US and the UK. A day’s racing at the massive Cheltenham meeting in 2008 was lost due to gale-force blasts in the Cheltenham Hills.

A British sports website lists the most common racing disruptors as unsafe ground (too soft or too hard), snow, frozen ground, waterlogged ground, high winds and high temperatures. Rarer spoilers are an absence of medical staff or an ambulance, disease and bomb threats. It might have added threats of track sit-ins by animal rights protesters – which has become a thing in the UK.

In South Africa we can add lightning to that list.

Headwinds and tailwinds

Getting buffeted by wind can put one in a bad mood. Perhaps that was what happened to the stipes at Fairview, who handed jockey Eldin Webber a R3,000 fine for what they said was a frivolous objection after Race 3, in which he finished second on the breezily named mare Mediteraneangoddess. It was not a forfeit of the objection fee, which is the usual punishment when the fuzz reckon their time has been wasted. A fine suggests real annoyance.

Watching the race video replay, you can see what Zackey was on about – and Webber for that matter. Mediteraneangoddes and Webber lead into the straight; Jambo Sana and Zackey pull wide on the turn for a run but veer inwards as they hit the wind. Mediteraneangoddes is crossed, no question, but seems to be travelling much slower than her rival and gets left floundering as Jambo Sana streaks away to win by 3.75 lengths.

When we speak of wind and racing, Cape Town immediately springs to mind. A headwind or tailwind is very often a significant factor when studying a race card. If a runner can find “cover” – shelter behind another – it can be a winning move and some of the resident riders of yore, like Karl Neisius and Glen Hatt, were masters of judging and juggling zephyrs below Table Mountain.

On a cornier note, a famous saying: “When the Almighty put hooves on the wind and a bridle on lightning, he called it horse.”