A day at the races

Early this year I covered the J&B Met for a magazine. It was interesting.

What I know about horses is dangerous. The sum total of my knowledge is that they featured prominently in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the girls who rode them when I was at primary school always smelled faintly of a paddock and had bigger arms than me. I'd also had the misfortune of going to the Vodacom July some years ago, an experience which made me swear that I would never go within 100 metres of another horse race again (My question to everyone: what is it about paying a lot of money to dress in uncomfortable clothing, get crushed in crowds and scorched in the sun for a full day that makes everyone so excited about the July? Because if you want an excuse to get drunk and flirt with scantily clad girls or guys with popped collars, that's what Toti's for, and it's cheaper.)

So considering this and the vast depths of my ignorance of all things equine, it was with some trepidation that I covered the J&B Met. Would it be obvious to all and sundry that I couldn’t tell a stirrup from a bridle, a stallion from a nag or a jockey from a gaily-dressed child? Fortunately, it seems that about three-quarters of the 45,000 or so people who went to the J&B Met this year were as badly versed in horse-lore as I was. What was also fortunate was that my wife could join me, and we were given tickets to the J&B Marquee.

It’s hard to describe just how awesome it was without seeming hyperbolic. If modern day oil sheikhs were nomadic and threw lavish parties in Bedouin tents I somehow doubt they could top it. There was more excellent food and drink than you could shake a riding crop at, mostly inoffensive live entertainment (though in a mid-day radio kind of way) and beautiful (and, in many cases, deranged) fashion to gawk and – if I'm being honest with myself – laugh at. Suffice to say much of the day was spent in a gastronomic daze, alternately heading between the buffet, ice cream station, bar and racetrack to yell at the exhausted horses as they ran fruitlessly in circles. I wish I’d had a copy of a gossip rag on me, because it would have been a fun diversion to play celebrity bingo. Michael Mol! Marc Lottering! Bryan Habana! Roxy Louw!

Early in the day we decided that we needed to get in on some betting, but realised looking at the programme that we had no idea how to pick a winning horse. So, as one does, we went with names that appealed to us. I ended up backing the splendidly named Eagle Squadron, which I thought could only be as sleek and fast as its title. Shockingly, a horse’s name has little to do with its speed. This would be a hard lesson I struggled to learn throughout the day, as all the horses I backed lagged traitorously towards the rear.

It was hard not to be romanced by all the abundance around me – all that food and drink couldn’t appreciate itself – but at the end of the day as we trudged through the horse pat bestrewn grass back to the car and passed the unwashed masses groaning in the dust and dressed in sackcloth, I realised a simple truth. Horse-racing is only worth a damn on someone else's dime in an air-conditioned tent while feasting on craft beer and fillet. Also, it helps to pick one's horses properly when betting, and for that I'll develop a foolproof system in the future, probably based on the jockeys’ outfits.