Thursday 18 June 2009

Honestly - they really DO need to land heel first!

After exercising 3 horses yesterday morning and getting absolutely saturated, I went in to get some dry clothes on before exercising the last 2...and got distracted by Royal Ascot :-)

For anyone who still doesn't think horses need to land first, the BBC is running some superb quality coverage this week, including stunning slow motion, high definition footage of the horses.

Guess what?  At a flat out gallop at the finish, the winners are all landing heel first.   Why should it be healthy for them to land any other way at walk or trot...? 

By the way, its interesting to watch the gait differences in the same horses at walk round the paddock...unfortunately they don't show that footage in slow motion (!)

2 comments:

Jill said...

Have you noticed they always put the name of the horse/trainer etc across the feet when they're walking around the paddock though - really irritating.

Watching Epsom back along the hot favourite for a race (can't remember name)was landing toe first in the paddock. Everyone was saying this horse couldn't be beaten. I was screaming at the T.V. 'can't you see it's lame!'

Guess what it came 10th!!!

Nic Barker said...

LOL! It worked on the race I saw today as well :-)