Weight For Age

Sometimes racing isn’t just about the horse.

As we walked through the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and saw Longchamp racecourse for the very first time, it silenced us. No easy feat considering the noisy conversation that had been rising up like a cloud over the leafless tree tops for the past fifteen minutes of our walk. The joggers on the sandy pavement, the cyclists on the wide stretch of car-less road, the horse riders in the woods alongside - all could be forgiven for thinking we numbered above a dozen; until the four of us came into view. Vicky, Kim, Deborah and I.

We were alone and revelling in it; our partners of the summer, who had quelled our giddy and incessant chatter, now a thing of the past. Some farewells said without tears or regret; some hearts broken irrevocably. Either way, we knew that this would be our final fling. Grown-ups loose abroad for the very first time; yet schoolgirls still for what would be our immature swan-song.

But right then we were silenced, over-awed by the racecourse looming up on the horizon, stretching out below us as we breached the hill of the Allee de Longchamp. It was an oval island within a perimeter of immense car parks and three lane traffic. At eleven in the morning, there were as yet no cars, but every lane was filled by cycling clubs, out in force for a Sunday morning stint.

We should have been dismayed by the sight of the wall-to-wall car parks, ready to accommodate the thousands who would flock to that afternoon’s Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe meeting. Somehow we would need to find our coach to travel back to England. But that was later, more than four hours of glorious racing ahead of us, and another three hours before the first of which would kick off. Right now the only thought in our minds was of our first sight of Longchamp and inevitably it broke the silence.

‘Wow!’ said Kim, speaking for all of us, ‘I shall never, never forget this moment.’

That turned out to be our most used phrase of the afternoon.

At once we became animated with conversation once more, quickening our steps to match our tongues as we hurried onwards towards the golden goal.

‘Look! The windmill at the top of the hill!’ Deborah exclaimed, spotting the famous mainstay of clichéd race commentators.

‘No, no, the woods at the top of the hill, then past the windmill,’ we reminded her, quoting commentaries past of the many great televised winners. Two and a half minutes later, having vocally covered a mile and a half at racing speed, we stood before the entrance gates, calling the previous season’s ‘Arc’ heroine Detroit home in word-perfect unison.

Detroit got home, as she had done in reality the season before, but our own time was yet to come. The gates were locked. We wandered with unseeing eyes around the lake opposite, not noticing Le Grand Cascade for another two years. We did, however, notice the first visible movement within the gates and rushed back instantly to accost a janitor. Pleading the need to use the toilets, we gained entrance some two hours ahead of opening and promptly made the course our own.

We were welcomed by the bronze of Gladiateur, a sight none of us would ever forget. Commemorative statues had yet to be introduced on British racecourses. Finding no one yet on duty to keep us out of the private enclosure, we slipped inside and pressed our faces against the glass front of the weighing room. A fish-bowl weighing room! Tailor-made for us! Valets moved within a room at the back, tending the vast rows of saddles over which we now drooled. The only two we might have recognised - navy blue and green oddities in an age before coloured leather was acceptable - were conspicuous by their absence. But still we gazed wistfully, knowing that one of those anonymous saddles belonged to a hero.

A lesser hero, the common or garden English jockey, stepped out from within the rows and took an instant step backwards in shock, unnerved by our familiar faces pressed against the window. Then he grinned and waved. We were home. Our jockeys were here, our horses were here, this was our turf.

As if to prove it, a group of English stable lads appeared from the far gates and joined us.

‘You’re early,’ they remarked, as though our presence alone was unremarkable, ‘d’you want to come and see the horses?’

We thought, at first, they were joking.

‘No, no, straight up,’ they assured us, ‘no guards on the gate, no passes needed - walk straight in!’

The only access to the racecourse stables was from this, the private enclosure, open only to owners and trainers. Since only owners and trainers were allowed in the racecourse stables, the lack of security made sense. But it offered no reassurance to our guilty hearts, unaccustomed to such freedom. We stepped hesitantly over the threshold, convinced that having come this far, within the very reach of our reward, we would suddenly be evicted.

For a moment our hearts stood still; quelled by fear, excitement and the sight of row upon row of the most famous and recognisable horses in Europe. Then we were gone - heading at breakneck speed to the first box, no longer concerned with security. No guard on earth could have succeeded in evicting us as we threw open the door to Detroit’s box. With the equine stars in every sphere from all over Europe gathered here in the one set of stables, we were in heaven. If we came upon one horse we failed to recognise, we had only to consult our race cards to discover that he must be the Russian horse; or the filly from Italy; or another quickly identifiable animal we had not before seen.

Kids in a candy shop, we left our escorts trailing in our wake, as we petted our idols, ungroomed within their boxes, hitherto seen only from the outside rail of a parade ring. It was like landing a date with every star in Hollywood. But one star shone above all others. Rough coated, unkempt and dozing like a carthorse by a kerbside, it was the French Derby winner, whose incomparable class still succeeded in shining through. The British horses were too familiar to us, even in this intimate setting; but here was our first sight of a French Champion, previously known only to us from photos in The Sporting Life.

There remained only one more equine icon to meet - not for her status or, heaven forbid, her looks, but for the man who would be riding her later that afternoon. The Hero, above all others, we had come to see. She herself had clearly not yet arrived, but we listened intently for the tell-tale crash of hooves as the horses were led out of horse boxes and into the yard. And we were rewarded with the sight of the ungainly filly herself passing by. The unnerving presence of her entourage prevented us from following her, but we had seen her, in this intimacy, and that was enough.

Now it was time to go in search of her partner, for whom we had been rehearsing our ‘je voudrais’ sentences. ‘Votre autographe’, ‘votre corps’, ‘enlever avec vous’, the various endings mattered not. We ‘would like’ anything from him at all and would still have floated home on our clouds had it been no more than a snub. To be snubbed by the French Champion Jockey - heaven!

What we met instead was the nearest runner-up in our Most Wanted stakes - the Champion French Apprentice and recent winner of the French Derby. We had only moments earlier been worshipping the hooves of his Derby winning partner, which only increased our ardour. We surrounded him en masse and requested in pitiful French son autographe.

He was disarmingly confused.

‘Moi?’ He pointed to himself, to make doubly sure.

We knew his face, yet his own doubt forced us to double-check his name.

He beamed at us, growing in stature with every passing second. ‘Mon autographe?’ He was incredulous. ‘You know me?’ Those were not his exact words, but a strange blend of pitiful schoolboy English and simplified French.

We responded in similar, reversed, fashion.

It slowly dawned on us that here in the private enclosure the French jockeys were kept away from their public and never had cause to sign an autograph. And this particular example, so far removed from the brash British equivalent, was even more non-plussed to discover he was known and admired abroad. Suddenly we were all - our idol included - transported to Cloud Nine.

He signed our books ‘Penotta’, much to our consternation, until he succeeded in explaining it was a nickname used by just close friends and family. By the end of the difficult explanation we were very much close friends and soon the language barrier had been shattered with gusto, along with the Richter scale.

If we were impressed with our new found prize, then he was more so and later sought us out in order to show us off to various acquaintances. One by one we met his sister and her girl friend, or possibly his girlfriend and her sister, our French being tested to its limit, and his parents and relations. They greeted us as celebrities, presumably because we were living proof that their Penotta was one himself.

Eventually he was recalled to the changing room, and we took up our posts beside the weighing room entrance, muttering our ‘je voudrais enlever avec vous’ quietly to ourselves. The great names of French racing passed by us and we watched them in silent awe. But our Hero was not among them. When the first of the horses entered the parade ring we were gone. Human icons would never win that battle.

The euphoria among us was marred only by Deborah. She complained at the aloofness of the French jockeys who had walked past us without a smile. Never mind that they didn’t know us from Adam. She complained at their pop socks showing above their boots, which was admittedly a culture shock for the four of us, though only she thought it worth mentioning. And she complained at the fleeting glimpse of the horses, who certainly completed less than the circuits of the parade ring than was obligatory back home. Always, back home, as though Longchamp had ceased to be home.

Trapped within the private enclosure, we could not go out to watch the races. We listened to the commentary, even though Deborah was adamant that the French commentator was calling a different race.

‘They say things like "moving up on the outside"!’ we argued, ‘of course we can’t make head nor tail of it!’

‘I listened for one name, that’s all, just one name,’ she insisted, ‘and he didn’t say it once.’

‘It was lost in an accent and all the other words!’

‘I’m telling you, he didn’t call this race - and just look at that!’ Her disgust was complete. The winning jockey was led by with his heels tucked up virtually under his backside, knees pointing to the ground. ‘How sloppy can you get!’

‘They ride short, it looks good,’ I protested; though I’d never seen anyone ride quite that short before.

‘They’re scruffy,’ she said simply.

But there, suddenly, was our Hero, walking out to the parade ring, his colleague doubled over with laughter at something he’d just said. We saw him in a human light for the very first time. And his pedestal heightened.

The horses did their usual single circuit of the parade ring and the jockeys mounted up. We were so busy trying to take in the details that we failed to notice that we had been joined by our new acquaintance. We gazed up at the Champion Jockey as he was led by.

‘Good?’ Penotta said admiringly.

We said nothing, all whispering in silent prayer, ‘Don’t lead him out yet, don’t lead him out yet...’ willing the lad to go round for a second circuit. Mercifully, the lad obliged, reluctant to allow his horse to canter down ahead of the other runners.

‘Je voudrais votre corps,’ Vicky murmured dreamily. ‘Are you sure Kermit gave us the right word for body? Is this ‘corps’ alive or dead?’ She asked, unable to tear her eyes away from the one up there on the last horse in the parade ring and pronouncing her French phonetically.

‘Does it matter?’ we all said with a sigh, gazing up at the body in question.

‘See the race?’ Penotta asked, with more gestures than words, surprised when we didn’t immediately turn to follow the runners out.

‘We’re sort of stuck in here,’ we explained, ‘We haven’t got passes.’

‘No passes, with me!’ Penotta declared and we went out to the grandstand together.

By the time the ‘Arc’ runners filed past we were firm friends. Detroit, unfancied today but still an ‘Arc’ heroine, kicked up a sod of turf, which I immediately dived under the rail to retrieve. I slipped the perfect muddy cast of her hoof lovingly into my pocket, much to the loud delight of the French racegoers around us. Their scorn mattered not; my only concern was probable arrest at customs when I tried to smuggle my prize home. Which forethought then led me to worry that the turf would not even survive in one piece for that long. Would it even survive at all?

‘Never mind the grass, what about our coach?’ Kim pointed out realistically, ‘I haven’t seen one person we travelled over with.’

This was the adult problem we had left on hold for our afternoon’s enjoyment. The coach had deposited us in the heart of the city that morning, taking the other members of our tour on a sight-seeing trip of Paris, while we elected to make our own way to the races and forego the delights of the city. To arrive at the races several hours early was delight enough for us. Now, however, we were faced with the problem of locating an unremarkable coach that could be parked in any of the five or six car parks we had seen, among any of the many hundred other unremarkable coaches.

‘The driver said he’d be leaving at five thirty pm sharp,’ Kim reminded us, ‘which means we should be out of here by five at the latest. He ought to drive around a few circuits looking for stragglers, we can’t be the only ones to lose him.’

‘Five!’ Deborah protested. ‘But the last race is five twenty-five!’ If the sight of a French jockey’s pop socks had offended her, this was a mortal blow. ‘I have never in my life left a racecourse before the last race,’ she, all of sixteen, declared hotly, ‘and I have absolutely no intention of starting now. This is the best day’s racing of my life and I will not leave early.’

She mirrored our own sentiments entirely, even though we had assumed up to that point that Longchamp was not the hallowed ground she had hoped for.

‘Well, I don’t want to leave without meeting the Champion Jockey,’ Kim agreed.

It appeared to be settled.

‘You do realise that if our driver does leave without us, we’ll be stranded here in Paris?’ we all checked with one another. But the lure of meeting a French Champion was too strong. He also happened to have a ride in the last race, which we hoped he would win. We discussed instead a plan of action that involved going to the police and wiring our parents for money, neither of which we knew how to do but had heard mentioned on TV, and both options enough to relax us for the remainder of the afternoon. We were mature in our confidence and oh so innocent in its assured happy outcome.

Our Hero duly won his race and we set up camp outside the weighing room, ready to accost him whenever he showed his face - which he failed to do. By six o’clock Penotta had also left, amid tears and hugs; and we said our farewells to the English contingent gathered with us and drifted out to find our coach.

In our hearts, we each expected to find it driving slowly back and forth, looking for lost trippers. Instead we found a traffic jam, with coaches cutting lanes at high speed and trying to get out onto the main road as quickly as possible. By seven o’clock we knew it had left without us. We were all, bar a panic-stricken Deborah, philosophical. She who had instigated this whole sorry affair now screeched at us to do something.

I found a gendarme directing the traffic and showed him first my coach ticket, then my watch. He took it all in without comment and flagged down the first coach with GB plates to pass, then stepped away to leave us to it.

‘Jump on,’ the driver told us.

‘Southampton?’

‘No, Dover.’

Close enough to one of our homes to phone a long-suffering parent.

‘There are four of us,’ we pointed out, ‘and we don’t have tickets with you?’

‘That’s okay, I’ve lost six myself - hop on!’

On the journey home we pondered not the logistics of catching trains to our various locations, or a three am phone call to request our rescue from Dover, nor even the warning to Kim’s parents not to bother meeting the eight am coach at Southampton.

The unexpected friendship of Penotta made little impact on our conversation, any more than our collective failure to elope with the French Champion Jockey. The horses, of course, dominated all talk; together with heated debates on pop socks and the offensive shortness of French breeches.

But what weighed most on our minds was the end of such flippancy. Though we vowed never to miss a future ‘Arc’ meeting, we knew that our vows would be soon enough broken. We had been given a taste of the adult world, but our temporary rescue offered no permanent escape.

We would never again be those same racegoers.

(Incidentally, enlever means elope...)