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2016 m. rugpjūčio 5 d., penktadienis

Lithuanian horseracing is alive again!



There is one quite small country in the Eastern Europe which has long history. Abandoned by Russians and Germans for several times, luckily it has freedom since 1991. But freedom does not include the luxury or traditions, nor the instructions how to rule the country and succeed. Horseracing is not excluded from this and when some foreign people might have  good laugh what we are doing here, I am really happy in my heart that this is happening at all. Being a lithuanian, I was lucky enought to grew up with the horseracing over here. It was a few racedays a year, few thoroughbreds and some mixed breed races. Everything in fields lined up by lines similar to electric fence. Being 11 years old, I had to ride thoroughbreds and loved it completely. It took us 8 years to get sport going, build a racetrack and invite at least polish people to compete against us. It is a huge achievement what we have dual purpose racetrack in the country with only 3 million people population. It really helps trainers to write up horses in the most suiting ground for them. Also, it is only one racetrack in the Baltic countries. Therefore Poland has three racetracks, all of them has only turf surface. Here, you can run horses on the dirt and see their potential. Meetings are held every three weeks, to keep small number of horses running whole season if possible. Small number of racehorses and lack of yearly traditions brings the one of the biggest problems: jockeys. At the moment, most of the owners are bringing polish jockeys to ride over here. One of them, Dmitryj Petryakov will soon guarantee Jockey of The Year status, as he won 3 races out of 5 rides both days when he was riding here. It is amazing achievement, as this lad always listens to trainers and brings the result even with outsiders. On the other hand, local jockeys are really strugling with weight, and some horses are carrying even more than 3kgs overweight. It is a huge problem in thoroughbred races, but it does not seem to bother our national breed race of Zemaitukai. Most of the winners in this race carried even 15kgs overweight and won! Zemaitukai are connemara's size horses, or even smaller. They have been as a war riding horses, now going racing, show jumping or endurance riding. Moreover, this race and mixed breed horses races shows how unique lithuanian horseracing is. It can not be missed so easy, so if you ever visiting Lithuania on the summer time, please have a look at www.raseiniuhipodromas.lt and you might see the show yourself only for 5 euros!