The Sport of Kings: ‘Newmarket is a town of seventeen thousand people and four thousand racehorses’ |
Rebecca Cassidy, Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, spent fifteen months in the yards and training grounds of Newmarket, researching a case study of ‘racing society’ the lads, jockeys, trainers and racehorse owners of a town where ‘everything is horse’. Below is an extract from The Sport Of Kings, her inspired account of a self-enclosed and minutely structured social order.
THE NATURE OF a first encounter with Newmarket is determined to a large extent by the season and the time of day at which the unsuspecting visitor arrives. Arrive on a wintry afternoon and an eerie calm permeates the town, the most energetic activities being shopping, pensioner-style. & Arrive in Newmarket early on a spring morning, however, and something of its true purpose will be revealed. The hundreds of racehorses who spend the rest of the day hidden away in the stables that are tucked into every corner of the town take over, and standing amongst the milling horses one is reminded that this is a town in which, as I was told, ‘everything is horse’. &
& Surveying the town from the top of Warren Hill, one sees an expanse of trimmed green, scarred by artificial gallops, separated by white plastic rails and dotted with hundreds of horses and riders in all colours. The sight is suggestive of order on the brink of chaos. Horses are easily startled and ‘shy’ at anything from puddles to suspiciously shaped leaves. Moreover, when one horse ‘shies’ in this way, the adjacent horses will often follow suit, the fright travelling like a shock wave across the Heath, occasionally disturbing riders in the process. & Rates of attrition on the Heath are higher for horses than humans, although there were two human fatalities on the gallops whilst I was riding. The Jockey Club provides emergency phones on the Heath, as well as two horse ambulances and a carcass collection service. Newmarket in the morning is a surreal place, buzzing with the activities of hundreds of centaur-like figures, nonchalant but serious, as though unaware of the danger and absurdity of answering rich men’s whims by teaching racehorses to run faster. &
& Status in Newmarket is often determined by access. Access to the training yard is determined by wealth. Access to the Jockey Club is subject to wealth, success and pedigree. The more exclusive the institution, the more highly it is valued by Newmarket racing society. The style and content of the language is also significant, because communication is not only intended to exclude, but also to create the impression that the interlocuters are in possession of greater power than is actually the case. The content of the language serves to mystify the outsider or newcomer by implying that the speaker holds power over uncontrollable processes & Thus, discussion of ‘stayers’, ‘sprinters’, ‘tongue straps’, ‘blinkers’ and ‘prickers’ initiate the distancing process of excluding outsiders, a process that may be completed by whole conversations based around ‘the influence of the going on a field of maiden hurdlers with good flat form but unproven jumping pedigrees.’ & The complexity of the vocabulary and style of the language of racing conceals the uncomfortable truth that fluency will not enable the speaker to predict which horse will win a race or which stallion will produce champion racehorses. &
& There are two obvious body shapes valued by Newmarket racing society, and they can be described in mutually opposing terms. & The ideal jockey is short, thin, tough, quiet, hunched, reticent. The ideal trainer is tall, elegant, straight-backed, self-assured and charismatic. & The lad’s body is not valued at all, and is generally lightweight, but not sufficiently so to be a jockey. His hands are rough and large, his face chapped and windburnt. Lads often look tired from their early mornings and late nights, but they are not credited with any definitive qualities. When I asked my trainer the favourable shape for a lad he replied: ‘Nondescript’. &
& The oppositions between the important bodies in Newmarket extend to the culinary preferences that enable the body to express these differences. Trainers were often associated with expensive and scarce foods, which are difficult to prepare and perhaps an ‘acquired taste’, for example, seafood, particularly shellfish, game, salads, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, high-quality preserved meats and vegetables, champagne, gin and tonic, and whisky. Jockeys are limited to small, low-fat meals of chicken, fish, dry toast, salad without dressings, black tea, mineral water and, occasionally, champagne. Lads eat crisps, tinned soups, sliced bread, chocolate and take-aways, and drink beer and fizzy drinks. The prevalence of smoking amongst all of the groups is stunning, and was often associated with weight control. It was suggested to me that genetic engineering had been extended to humans in Newmarket, but of course the body is worked on by society rather than simply biologically determined. The sixteen-year-old son of a former jockey, for example, who weighed 4 stone 4 lbs fully clothed, and had gone straight into a yard at fifteen, told me that he would much rather have finished school. &
& Naturally lightweight jockeys have less of a struggle than those who are tall or heavy, but almost all jockeys have to ‘waste’, a combination of dieting and sweating, that is potentially debilitating. Ex-jockeys told me that their appetites were permanently affected by their need to waste. In one case the jockey had gained four stone when he gave up race riding through bingeing, returning to ten stone through a diet of oysters, jalapeno peppers and raw onions. This individual had retained something of an obsession with his weight, and told me that he found himself disgusting when he weighed fourteen stone. &
& Whilst it has been suggested that clothes fuse the biological and cultural bodies, merging private and public, in Newmarket, animal and human bodies are also merged. Riding a horse fuses the two bodies so that it is difficult to establish where one ends and the other begins, both are wearing whatever either is wearing & The horse is thus an extension of the rider’s body as are clothes, but the horse is also an extension of the trainer whose reputation and monogram he carries. & Only rarely are racehorses left ‘naked’, even when stabled. One of the horses in our yard was adept at removing his rugs during the night, after which he would delicately pull all of the fluff from one of his woollen blankets with his teeth. When his lass found him ‘naked’ each morning she would blush, as though he was being inappropriate in some way, and say ‘Oh gosh, he’s undressed himself again!’ Perhaps the most significant horse clothing of all is the rug presented to the winners of big races; usually brightly coloured and bearing the name of the race and its sponsor, the horse carries its status on its back.
The Sport of Kings, Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket, by Rebecca Cassidy, is published by Cambridge University Press on August 29.
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