400 RACE RIDING. 



necessarily deprive himself of the valuable assistance he 

 can obtain from his legs in guiding, collecting and stimulating 

 his horse, as I have tried to explain in Chapters X. and XL 

 The manner in which many of the crouching jockeys bump up 

 and down in their saddles is a travesty of good horseman- 

 ship. The action of bending forward and lowering the head 

 which is greatly practised by jockeys, naturally decreases the 

 resistance of the body to the wind, which is an important 

 factor in race riding, except when there is a strong wind on 

 the back of the horseman. We may gain a fair idea of the 

 resistance of the air, by putting our head out of a railway 

 train which is going, say, 36 miles an hour, which would be 

 about equal to the speed at which a fairly good racehorse could 

 cover a mile. A capable jockey will be able to tell by the 

 way his horse is going, how he ought to distribute his weight, 

 and prevent his body from offering an undue impediment 

 to the wind. The saddle cannot be brought much more 

 forward than its ordinary position. Sloan's seat (Fig. 243) 

 was a style of riding that no English jockey ought to have 

 adopted, in fact it has been pronounced by many trainers as 

 the curse of racing. Jones, His Majesty's jockey, is an 

 imitator of Sloan, as a glance at Fig. 245 will demonstrate, 

 and is a more accurate exponent of the crouching seat than 

 the jockey in Fig. 246. In Fig. 247 we see the English 

 racing seat which all good horsemen will like to have revived 

 again. It is a pitiable sight to see the unbalanced manner in 

 which many race-horses, especially big raw two-year-olds, 

 struggle along swerving and rolling in their efforts to gallop 

 under riders who, by reason of their crouching seats, have not 

 the ability to collect them to gallop in a level manner. What 

 appears to be gained in speed by the crouching seat offering 

 less resistance to the wind is also, to a large extent, nullified 

 by the fact that as this seat puts more work on the muscles 

 of the forehand, it is only suitable for short distance racing 



