MARATHON (Update)

I suggested in Sport 38 that you should Google “running form comparison” and notice how Mo Farah takes longer strides than  Gebrsellassie and Bikele – longer and therefore using up more energy. Now here’s something equally important. Look at the same filmclip and hold a biro up against the level of the runners’ heads. The other two heads will not emerge above the biro, but Mo’s will. A sure sign that he is using up even more  unnecessary energy than they are,  by propelling his body further into the air with each stride.

This is vital info for those trainers already in fast work for the 2015 London Marathon. I hear that a certain owner has promised to award six yearlings to any trainer who finishes in front of the winner of his “Trainers’ Race”.

OBESITY (Update)

In Sport 33, OBESITY, Part 2, I told the reader to walk backwards, and at the time that was the right advice. But now that a disciple has put in months of work and is very much fitter, he or she is ready to upgrade. Don’t walk, jog backwards. To begin with go v.slowly, and stop at the first tingle of vertigo. Think about relaxation, short paces, and regular over-the-shoulder glances. Be very afraid of over-long shoelaces and furniture with sharp corners if you’re indoors.

If you get it right, it is extremely good for balance and coordination, and I suspect that a flexible neck is like garlic:  v. healthy.

STARTING (Large fields, under NH rules)

BRITISH HORSERACING AUTHORITY  (BHA) STARTING TO LOOK GOOD

History has been made! Walking has become the mandatory gait for the movement of runners up to the moment when the tapes go up. As a result better starts are happening even with large fields. Why it has taken the authorities so long to see the light in this respect – only Mr Jamie Stier knows. However a man who has seen the light is an enlightened man, however long it takes, and this is a step in the right direction.

If prizes were awarded to those who have driven this development in the right direction, the first prize would belong to Paul Struthers and his jockeys.

However, still more needs to be done. The “Stier rolling maul” is still being used, which means that, as they prepare for the start, the horses are in a tightly-packed procession consisting of (in a big field) five or six ranks. So there is a guarantee that, when the tapes go up, some horses will have been favoured and some penalised.  That is wrong. The principle endorsed by virtually every sport in the world insists that, before a contest begins, every contestant will be given the same chance.

Consider also the following. Even someone who has watched no more than a dozen steeplechases will have noticed the room for manoeuvre which the jockeys require as they cope with the hazards of a dangerous sport. They don’t ask for much, but they do need room to create their own path round a course, giving themselves and their mounts the best chance to see the obstacles they are approaching, plus a margin for error, in case the activities of other riders may impinge on their own arrangements.

In that context, it is difficult to defend a starting process which jams horses together laterally, and guarantees that, in a twenty-runner field (four rows of five horses, in the “rolling maul”, for example) at least ten of the runners will not be able to see the first fence or hurdle when the tapes go up. They will be running blind until  their jockeys have had time to  extricate them from a scrum and a blindfold imposed not by natural causes, but by a starting system that is particularly dangerous when the run to the first obstacle is on the short side.

It is ironical that one is talking in terms of scrums and blindfolds and lateral pressure when the racecourse is synonymous with wide open space and room to move. It is also ironical to be talking in those terms when a system exists which spent two hundred fairly recent years showing how starting large fields under NH rules should be done.

Nil desperandum! They’ve talked the talk and now the horses are walking the walk. That’s something.

I wish Mr Stier would engage his senior starter in conversation with the words, “I reckon this drongo is mad as a meat axe!” Noting a look of bewilderment on the other’s face, he might elucidate. “This Donec drongo claims that taking a turn, nose to tail, at the walk, is the best way to prepare horses for a start, and  that changing from a circle into a reasonably straight line abreast  can be done in five paces! Plenty of room and visibility perfect. I reckon that’s garbage!”

If that conversation were to take place, and develop a life of its own, who knows what might be the outcome?

Yes, I do believe in Father Christmas.

Compliments of the season and best wishes for 2015.

Donec