Frustration

Tyke ran pretty miserably today at Chantilly. First he decided he didn’t want to load in the gate, then he immediately got his tongue over the bit, pulled like a train for about 1,300 meters and then, of course, had no puff to actually finnish the race, which was a mile, or 1,600 meters. The jockey said he has plenty of speed and absolutely no discipline. The gate behaviour didn’t surprise me all that much, since he was acting the same way about going into his box in the stabling area. You had to ask him two or three times, then, when he thought it was his idea, he went in fine. Same with the gate; it was clear it wasn’t fear, and there’s nothing wrong with him, but he just decided HE wanted to be the one to decide when to go in. The poor gentleman jockey had a pretty unpleasant ride, and almost came off when Tyke decided he was going around a horse in front of him, no matter what the jockey thought.

I know at home, Tyke has transformed from a cowardly baby to a big horse with ideas of his own. I was happy enough to accept some character flaws in exchange for training well and an overall more brave attitude, but I’m a little disappointed with his behaviour at the gate. I’ll have to take him through a few times at home to see if we can’t straighten this out. Trying to find the positives, a few things that happened today are relatively easy to fix: we’ll add a tongue-tie and do some gate training, plus scale back the distance for the next race and just let him gallop out. I suspected a mile might be too long, and it was confirmed. He has plenty of speed, so he’ll come back to 1,400 meters for the next race (I’d rather have 1,200, but there’s nothing coming up). He’s training too well at home and showed he has enough speed, so I’m not ready to give up on him yet. He’ll get a couple of more chances before we decide whether to continue with him.