FROM STUD AND STABLE Top Jockey’s Career Calls For Spartan Existence

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31005, 10 March 1966, Page 4

FROM STUD AND STABLE Top Jockey’s Career Calls For Spartan Existence

Behind the success stories of many jockeys are little publicised stories of dedication, discomforts, even hardships.

Lucky the Noel East woods; but natural light-weights of the Eastwood stamp are few.

How R. J. Skelton must have envied the likes of Noel Eastwood last week as he was taking heroic measures to reduce to close to 7-5, Captain’s Command’s weight in the Railway- Handicap at Trentham last Saturday. Skelton rode Captain’s Command at 7-8, or 31b overweight, to victory in the £l5OO six-furlong race on the first day of the Wellington autumn meeting. Two days earlier he would have been unable to ride the l Messmate colt at 7-13. Before he left Wingatui last Friday morning Skelton had a long spell in a “sweat box” at home. Then he motored to Christchurch, and spent over two hours in a reducing bath owned by a jockey friend here.

Skelton stayed overnight in Christchurch, and before he caught the first aircraft north

on Saturday morning he was in the reducing bath for another sweat. Lead Vest To make it worse Skelton’s “light ride” on Captain’s Command was not until the sixth race, run fairly late in the afternoon. Before that he had ridden Palisade, the successful topweight, with 9-6 in the Chalmers Handicap. This meant

wearing a lead vest which is not all that comfortable after a hard spell of "wasting.” The hard “wasting” can be forgotten in the excitement of the racing, especially if successes are coming along, but there is usually a reaction at the end of the day when life resumes its normal tempo. The realisation that so much personal discomfort was being faced for comparatively small rewards in the South Island started Skelton thinking about a move to the north some time ago. And after he rides at Trentham on Saturday he will work his way through the North Island to Auckland where he will settle with his family. Hard To Resist

‘lt was hard to resist the North Island with its many more opportunities and its rewards,” Skelton said recently. “For riding the second horse in an intermediate race in Auckland my percentage was greater than it was for

winning the big race on a Dunedin programme.” Skelton, whose great judgment of pace has helped him to develop into a masterly rider of stayers, in particular, took a lot of pleasure out of winning m Palisade at Trentham last week. This was Palisade's twentieth win. and Skelton also rode the Ruthless gelding when he won his first race, at Riverton, in 1962 W. C. Gye was the rider when Palisade won a race for apprentices at the same meeting, but Skelton again had the mount when Palisade rounded off a hat-trick with a win in an intermediate race at the Dunedin winter meeting that year. The winner of the Provincial Handicap on the same programme was a distinguished contemporary of Palisade in Kumai.

Kumai, like Palisade, was to become another notable performer at Trentham, but as a winter performer, each time in the hands of Bob Skelton's brother-in-law, B. J. Anderton.