Too Many Blinkered And Blinded
The Sunday Age
Sunday November 5, 2000
IT was late in the afternoon at the show at Briagolong, a day's hard ride from the mouth of the Snowy River, and there was a chill in the air. The freshly cut firewood had all been sold, the beer was running low, too, and the pony rides were packing up. Wisps of smoke were drifting up from the little township, and the word ``pub" now had an inviting ring to it.
But first there was a horse race to be run. The course was a mystery, at least to this untrained city eye. The riders began on the showgrounds, disappeared from sight on the scrubby rise behind, before emerging to plunge down a hillside steep and rugged enough to make the Man from Snowy River draw rein, then finished with a sprint across the flat of the showgrounds.
The first lap was uneventful, but on the second, the leading horse baulked at a fallen log on the hillside and toppled the rider from the saddle. The second rider stopped abruptly, swung out of the saddle and only when it was clear that the fallen rider was not seriously hurt returned to the race. The rest of the field, meantime, had thundered past, kicking up a cloud of dust and twigs as it went.
It would be nice to be able to report that the galloping gallant caught up and won. She didn't. But she gave it a hell of a shot, charging recklessly down the last slope and riding furiously across the flat, horse frothing at the mouth, to finish second.
I don't know who she was, or what she did. I was a holidaymaking passerby. The townsfolk cheered, but otherwise made no big deal of it. They presented the prizes from the back of a semi-trailer, tipped out the ice, zipped up the tents and went to the pub.
It happened a while ago, and as sporting morality tales go, it is scarcely on the John Landy/Ron Clarke scale anyway. No one there appeared to think much of it at the time, and probably none think of it all now. It was as though chivalry was an everyday thing, and to everyday people, it is.
But it sprang again to my mind this week, partly because horses and horse-racing are at the top of the sporting agenda, partly because the spring carnival is being jostled for attention by a succession of examples of pinched, petty and parsimonious sporting spirit.
Cheating football clubs bitch about other cheating football clubs, as if one form of duplicity is more honorable than another. More cricketers are revealed to have their price, and moreover for it to be wretchedly low; too many were happy to sell their game for a song. A millionaire entrepreneur complains of a lack of training facilities for his 100 horses. Diddums!
Sadly, these famous folk are all more blinkered and blinded than any racehorse. Sadly, they have eyes not for the finish line, but the bottom line. They ought all to have been at the Briagolong show that day; they would have had a rare, humbling experience.
© 2000 The Sunday Age