When I started thinking about this final newsletter of 2013, I decided to avoid making a review of the past year and making predictions about the future. After all, there will be six newsletters in the five-month winter period between the end of the 2013 Czech horseracing season and the beginning of the 2014 season. During this period, there is generally not much happening. I need to be careful not to concentrate all the looking back into a single end-of-year newsletter.

As for predicting what will happen in 2014, I give up. For the last couple of years, I have been trying to limit my predictions, and to forecast only certainties. For example, the date on which the Velka Pardubicka will be run at Pardubice, and the course at which the Czech Derby will be run on the fourth Sunday in June. I hereby predict that our main races in 2014 will be run on the traditional dates at the traditional courses: the Czech Derby will be at Prague Velka Chuchle, on Sunday, June 22^nd, 2014, and the Velka Pardubicka will be held on Sunday, October 12th, 2014 at Pardubice racecourse.

Yet how good have I been recently at predicting even something so certain as the date and place of our top races in the coming season? In 2013, our Derby was run at Most racecourse, due to flooding in Prague, and in 2012, the Velka Pardubicka was run on a Saturday, for reasons too complicated and too banal to explain again here. No wonder I have lost confidence in my ability to predict anything, since I have not even been able to make correct predictions about fixed points in the next year’s racing calendar.

However, my attempt to ignore the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 only made the January newsletter difficult to compose. It was a fixed idea that really did not make sense. After all, it could have prevented me giving my new year’s greetings to all readers, and also to everyone connected with Czech horseracing. May 2014 be a good and lucky year for us all.

We had plenty of mild weather throughout December 2013. The stormy weather that has been impacting northwestern Europe has mainly passed us by. In the western suburbs of Prague, where I have spent practically the whole month, there has been no snow and only a limited amount of rain. There have been plenty of sunny days and mild evenings, and only light frosts in the mornings.I read that we have been benefitting from the influence of the Föhn winds. Wikipedia states that “Central Europe enjoys a warmer climate due to the Föhn, as moist winds off the Mediterranean Sea blow over the Alps”. The weather forecast suggests that the recent mild weather will continue well into January.

Most of our trainers have now stopped racing their horses until spring. However, Vaclav Luka junior, who has an all-weather training track at Bošovice, near Pisek, an hour south of Prague, intends to continue sending some horses to run on the flat in France. Josef Vana senior sent some horses to run in southern France early in December, but without success. Within the last month, small numbers of Czech-trained horses have run without success at remote seaside racecourses on the French Mediterranean coast (Cagnes-sur Mer, Marseille Pont des Vivaux) and at Deauville. on the French Atlantic coast. Only a single horse has been sent to run in Italy, at Grosseto.

Time will tell whether anything significant has happened in Czech racing in the past month. It is possible that the changes at the top of the Czech Steeplechase Association, in combination with the changes at the top of the Association of Racehorse Owners and Breeders earlier in the year, will lead to significant change in the leadership of the Czech Jockey Club, see http://www.dostihovy-svet.cz/en/node/3076. There will be an election for the president of the Czech Jockey Club in January. It remains to be seen whether long-time president Vaclav Luka, senior, will be re-elected, and, if not, what kind of reforms a new president might attempt to introduce.

In a month of December in which major events seem to have been few and far between, and perhaps absent altogether, I have been interested to read various interviews with leading Czech jockeys on various Czech websites: Dostihovy svet, Fitmin, and Galopp Reporter. Having failed to make time to translate any of these interviews in full, I will now summarize them and comment on them.

The interviews that I will comment on are, firstly, with jumps jockeys Jan Faltejsek and Josef Vana junior, and then with flat jockeys Eliska Kubinova, Vaclav Janacek and Filip Minarik, and finally with Iva Milickova, who has now given up race riding and is currently working in Dubai.

In the last 16 months, Jan Faltejsek has changed from being an underrated, unlucky, underachieving jumps jockey, picking up experience riding here, in Italy and in the UK, into a double winner of the Velka Pardubicka on Orphee des Blins, in 2012 and 2013, and now a major jockey in France, with almost 40 winners in the 2013 calendar year. Jan is now taking his first holiday in more than a year, and is spending it in the Czech Republic. Very wisely, he is planning no changes. He wants to continue with top trainer Guillaume Macaire, build on his breakthrough achievements in 2013, and to continue, as he puts it, “working on himself”.

Josef Vana jnr is probably our best jumps jockey nowadays, though of course Josef Bartos, Jan Faltejsek and Jaroslav Myska are also top international jockeys and not far behind him. Vana won our jumps jockeys’ championship, and finished third in Italy, behind Raffaelo Romano and Josef Bartos, who both have the considerable advantage of riding for the predominant Italian trainer, Paolo Favero. Vana, of course, has the considerable advantage of riding as first jockey for his dad.

The high point of Vana’s season was his winning ride in the Gran Premio at Merano on Alpha Two, trained by his father. However, he says “In fact, we have not yet received prizemoney from October 2012. Bartos and I are the only foreign riders to have been paid at least for four months of this year [2013]. Apart from that, the Italians have not been paying up. This year, they have not been paying the jockeys. Above all, the owners and trainers have not been paid, and that is a big problem.” Vana’s father, who trained the first and third finishers in the Gran Premio at Merano, is one of the biggest creditors of Italian racing. Young Josef says “We just don’t know how to get the money out of them. All the paperwork has been done, but the money does not come through. We are probably going to have to keep pestering them. That may work, but just making claims and waiting does not seem to have any effect on them.”

As I have written before, we would really like Italian racing to reverse its collapse, become solvent and pay up. Everyone in Czech racing loves racing in Italy, but nobody wants to go on being paid prizemoney in the form of IOUs.

The most successful Czech-born jockey in 2013 was Eliska Kubinova. Eliska did not ride a winner during her apprenticeship at Velka Chuchle, and went to the USA as an au pair. In Oregon State, she started doing a bit of work riding. The trainer saw that she was talented, and got her to take out a licence. Her career took off instantly. At the age of 24 she has just finished a calendar year in which she rode 99 winners, 44 of them at Portland Meadows. In 2012 she had ridden over a hundred winners. http://www.femalejockeys.com/kubi.html.

Filip Minarik, from a famous Velka Chuchle-based family, has been a leading jockey in Germany for more than a decade, and won the German flat jockeys’ championship a couple of years ago. He has just returned to riding after suffering from one of those weakening diseases that used to be called glandular fever. I think he was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV). He says he still feels far from well. My research, if that is the word I am looking for, for this newsletter suggests that jockeys suffer quite a lot from EBV and other weakening diseases, probably as a result of their generally stressful lifestyle, combined with chronic dehydration. We all wish Filip a steady return to good health.

Vaclav Janacek won the Czech flat racing jockeys’ championship seven times before he went to Spain, and in 2009 he raised the record number of winning rides in a Czech season from 48 to 84. The following season, he managed to win the jockeys’ championship both here and in Slovakia. Nevertheless, he says, he was considered an unknown quantity when he arrived in Spain. He very quickly established himself, however, and he has won the Spanish jockeys’ championship in each of the last two years. If he had not picked up a suspension in December, he might have broken the Spanish record, too, in 2013. Janacek was known here as an obsessive professional, not only as concerns riding, but also in his knowledge of the whole racing operation. He would phone owners and trainers and advise them which races to enter their horses in, and in the same breath he would offer to ride the horse. Some older-style owners, trainers and even jockeys thought this was inappropriate behaviour, and it was certainly something quite new here. The idea used to be that jockeys should listen respectfully to owners and trainers, and carry out their instructions.

Janacek says that the best horses at the top courses in Spain are better than the horses in the Czech Republic, and in particular that Spanish-bred racehorses are considerably better than Czech-bred horses. He points out that Spanish-breds are regularly sold and do well in France. He also says that the top seven jockeys in Spain are very good. He is engaged to ride in Spain again in 2014, but does not exclude the possibility of riding again one day in the Czech Republic, though it would take a good offer. Interestingly, he says “[the offer] would have to be from a stable that races all year round, so that I could ride races in winter, too. It’s a pity the Czech jockeys throw their talent away in the winter months, when there is no racing here. Over a period of 10 years they lose 40 months in this way, when they could be riding and improving their skills. If you don’t ride in the winter, it shows in your performances in the spring, and you don’t get back into good form until June or July.”

In my real job, I work in the international office of a university, and we have worked hard on re-establishing the international reputation of Czech engineering education. Our professors are now very widely known to be top researchers, and our graduates are now rightly highly employable anywhere in the world. It saddens me that such good and highly professional Czech jockeys as Vaclav Janacek and Filip Minarik, and Josef Vana junior and Jan Faltejsek can still be considered as “unknown quantities” and still have to struggle so long and so hard to be recognized abroad. No international sport is so provincial as horseracing is. Even in showjumping and eventing, there is international interest in good young riders from anywhere in the world, while in football there are nowadays talent scouts promoting any teenager anywhere who has just a little talent.

Of course, Janacek, Minarik, Vana and Faltejsek have the advantage of being males. In most countries, females are considered more or less unemployable as jockeys – though inexplicably women do quite well against men in showjumping and in eventing.

Eliska Kubinova has achieved her successes in the USA, where there is less prejudice against female race riders. But how about Iva Milickova? She was a top rider here between 2002 and 2007. She rode over 1000 races, and had over 100 wins. In her last four seasons here, she rode over 200 races per season, which made her one of the top two or three most-engaged Czech riders. After the 2007 season, she went to Newmarket. She got few opportunities to ride in races, except from a female trainer, Jane Chapple-Hyam, and in 2010 she had a very bad accident in the starting stalls at Great Yarmouth. Early in 2013, Iva decided that she would never get sufficient strength back in her injured knee to continue successfully as a race rider, and she decided to retire and concentrate on work riding. As she says “It is sometimes better to work out on a Group 1 winner than to ride a race at the back of the field on a slower horse.” In 2013, she rode work for three trainers at Newmarket – for Roger Varian, John Berry and Michael Wigham. Then, after the end of the flat-racing season, she went to work for South African trainer Mike de Kock in Dubai.

Years ago, I made a new year’s resolution never again to make a new year’s resolution. I am therefore not going to finish this newsletter with a new year’s resolution for 2014. Nevertheless, I am going to finish it with a wish, that racing will finally set about establishing an international framework, so that we can work on harmonizing the rules of racing, on ensuring that owners, trainers and riders registered in other countries receive their prizemoney (and pay their dues) in the same way as local owners trainers and riders, and on enabling talented boys and girls to get really good opportunities to ride internationally. If there are changes in the leadership of the Czech Jockey Club in 2014, I hope this will be a new priority.