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Re: [RC] riding and/or racing - Maryanne GabbaniWhen they started Endurance with the sheiks' help here, there was a big push to have it be a sport where the horse had to be ridden by its owner. This may seem kind of elementary to most of you, but Egypt is a country where we have so many people who need work that if you can afford horses people would make you almost feel like a criminal not to employ at least one or two grooms to help care for them. For most of us having grooms doesn't add that much to the cost of horsekeeping and, since life in general is very, very time consuming they really do help. I speak from experience having spent three hours in a government office today just to sign a piece of paper....plus another three in traffic to get there and back.Many of our riders felt that it wasn't appropriate for someone to own a horse, have a groom train it and condition it, and then come to the Endurance Race to sit in posh clothes while a groom rode the horse to victory (at least in theory). Personally, I had a different idea: that Endurance was a sport for a horse and its owner, but that the owner could be from any social class as long as he/she could work with the horse. Slight conflict there. When the more afflluent local riders saw how it was working in reality, most of them dropped out of the scene because most of the non-commercial owners here might have one or two or maybe half a dozen horses, but no one had the sort of industrial stables that could engage in serious competition with the UAE. AND, to my mind more importantly, there was no information being disseminated by the FEI on how to properly train a horse to do 100 km in ungroomed sand without either crippling or killing it. There were a lot of dead horses before people wised up. The end result was that the local FEI rides devolved into races where the hack stable owners near the pyramids (for the most part but not exclusively...there are a few seriously working family competitors) had their grooms racing against each other for the prize money offered by the federation. For these grooms, the prize money was a big deal, for the stable owners a dead horse wasn't a big deal. Not exactly the atmosphere you want for your kids. There is room for fun LD rides here and we have had some good ones in the past and hopefully will have them in the future. Having decided that if I wanted to ride Endurance (see grammatical note) and even more importantly have fun, I would simply have to throw my own ride, I will find out who is interested in that locally. I've had a few of the local folk who had given up on the grimness of the Endurance scene express an interest and have heard from three Canadians who think that early November in sunshine sounds like fun. Time will tell. Maryanne Cairo On Feb 6, 2006, at 3:48 AM, Steph Teeter wrote: Laney - that's a very interesting question - the types of horses and riders =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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