Durban Blog: the Summerveld Training Center

As we exited the highway and drove up a dark sideroad that led to Summerveld Training Centre, I thought about two things. First, that after 64 hours of travel, it was nice to not be on a plane. Second, that fields on the sloping hills in the distance seemed to be on fire, and no one else in the passenger van seemed the least bit concerned.

I had arrived in Durban, South Africa on Thursday evening, three days after leaving Lexington, Kentucky. There was a cancelled flight, an uneasy sleep in the airport, a cross-city dash, a missed flight, etc. But now it was Friday morning; I made it in plenty of time for the G1 Vodacom Durban July the next afternoon, and all was right with the world again. Except for the burning fields.

“They're burning sugar cane,” someone finally explained. The rest of the people in the van, media from all over the globe, had arrived a day earlier and already seen the fires. Apparently it's part of the harvesting process. (I didn't even know that South Africa grew sugar cane. It is the world's 10th-largest sugar producer, it turns out.)

It was still dark when we got to Summerveld, which is a roughly 30-minute drive west of Durban. The training center is huge, and houses most of the horses which compete at the nearby Greyville Racecourse. It's generally unlikely that the first horse you see in a country you've never visited is the reigning Triple Crown winner, but that's what happened when we climbed a small hill and saw Abashiri (SAf) being led around in a fenced-off ring under the watchful eye of trainer Mike Azzie. He was one of five or six horses in a row and, frankly, would have gone unnoticed as a physical had he not been pointed out.

More conspicuous, however, were the four or five security guards that had been hired to watch the champ, who was set to compete in the July a day later (he'd be well-beaten as the co-favorite). The guards wore red, black and white camouflage jackets that had stitched doberman pinchers on the back, along with the name of the company that provided them. It was a good guess they weren't horseman. This was confirmed when a loose horse got into the area, and the whole security team dove for cover. (Abashiri himself was nonplussed.)

A little while later, Abashiri was being led back to his stable when another horse got loose and began running in his direction down the primary horse path from the barns. From a distance, you could see the guards scatter again–one actually hurdled a fence and ran toward a building.

Anyway, why the security? The short answer is, I don't know. But the long answer, in my head, has something to do with the fact that it's the 50th anniversary of the shooting of the popular champion Sea Cottage. (In brief, Sea Cottage was a heavy favorite for the 1966 July when, a month before the race, he was shot in the soft flesh of the hind-quarters by a slow-witted gangster looking to settle a debt with a bookie. He was later caught, however, after using his own bright yellow convertible as a getaway car. For the full story, click here.)

There are more than 1,700 horses at Summerveld, and housing for some 1,400 workers on the property, which buzzes with activity from early in the morning to well past 10 or 11 a.m. It's pretty incredible to watch, really. There are dozens and dozens of horses out at any given time, and sets criss-cross and pass each other. The high-energy horses in the group make things interesting, and there are no lead ponies to temper or shield.

The bigger trainers at the center have a designated ring (called that, though they're square), a maybe 20×20-yard area where the horses can get out of their stalls and be walked by their handlers before or after more serious exercise. The best I could tell, there were eight or 10 of the yards in total.

There are four primary training surfaces, including turf and all-weather gallops used for speed work. The property itself is very hilly, and with very few trees (the topography was similar to Northern California), the horses get plenty of exercise on the various pathways.

At one point, we heard a large group of men singing a traditional African song in the distance. They got continually louder, but the song was low and mellow, and when the men–a bit group of 15 exercise riders from the Sean Tarry stable–finally emerged from behind a stand of trees on their horses, the foreign media stood in complete rapture. These were the most relaxed and content horses we saw.

It was one of those experiences, the exposure to something unique to a place, that makes the inevitable hassles of long-distance travel absolutely worth it. And it just happened to be at a beautiful horse facility.