One trainer's thoughts on whipping and drivers

I talked to a veteran trainer the other day who has a four-year-old mare who’s doing quite well this season. That’s quite a switch from her first two seasons at the races when was something like 0-for-28. This year she’s 6-for-8.

I asked him how she couldn’t win a race for two years and now she can’t seem to lose a race.

“I finally found the right driver,” he told me. “I had something like 15 drivers on her. None of them would do what I told them to do. None of them respected her. They all want to whip and slash because it’s the macho thing to do and they think it makes for a good show. But this mare won’t take that.”

He said that he finally found a driver that respects him and his horse.

“Watch him when he drives her,” the trainer said. “He taps her two times with the whip and then tucks it away. She loves to hunt down horses. She’ll do it on her own.”

He told me that his adverse feelings toward whipping aren’t new.

”Years ago I had a fairly prominent driver race one for me,” he explains. “He used the whip quite a bit, but won the race.”

When the driver came off the track, he bragged to the trainer, “Well, I got you a stakes win.”

The trainer replied, “Yeah, but you drove her like a cheap horse and you’ll ever drive her again.”

This trainer believes that whipping and slashing on a horse will ultimately make good horses race like cheap ones.

“They won’t try if a driver’s beatin’ on ‘em,” he says.

He’s not among those who think we should toss away the whips and says that he’s never taken one of his horses to the track without carrying a whip. But he says that drivers overdo whipping out of ignorance. And he’s a got mare winning races that is proof of his beliefs.

It was quite an interesting conversation.