The story of Cairo's 50 km

Apr 2000
Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

It is my firm belief now that all ride managers go directly to a heaven where they get to ride beautiful, well-mannered horses with comfortable saddles while being offered large icy glasses of perfectly chilled lemonade or white wine, as the mood hits. Our 50 km ride convinced me that ride managing could be used as a form of cathartic psychotherapy/weight reduction program/skin abrasion treatment.

It wasn’t really my plan to manage this ride. My plan was to ride it on my fairly recently acquired mongrel (Arab/New Forest pony???) who had completed the 20 km with no problems, but he slipped on some cement and incurred a hairline cannon bone fracture, so no riding for me. When a tractor trailer demolished the side of my new Jeep a week before the ride, I decided that I might be getting some kind of divine, or at least noticeable, message.

Now as I detail the day, please keep in mind that this is the second real endurance ride that we’ve ever done in Egypt and we really don’t even have any available models to draw on (at least none that we really want to use). We laid out two loops from the same club that we used the last time, one of 25 km and the other of 30 km. So it was really 55, oh well.

The owner of the club decided that since we were holding the race on the main holiday, Friday, we could only have half the space that we’d used last time. I predicted disaster, but happily on that score was proved wrong. But it did mean that traffic control had to be very, very strict. Last time people had brought cars up to unload horses. This time they had to unload about 50 yds away then drive out of the club to wait, and saddles and bridles actually had to be carried in from the cars. Don’t laugh. Some people were not too happy.

There being some current disputes about what sports body is responsible for endurance racing (please don’t complain about AERC. At least you have it and don’t have to be creating it), the applications got out late. However, most of our riders had things together by Wednesday, which was the cut off. Thursday afternoon we had a briefing and a vet check for the riders within walking distance to take the pressure off the Friday morning.

As before, the UAE crew arrived late the night before the ride, but we had our local vets and the students to do the first check. The students were a joy as they don’ t get much hands on experience and they really blossomed this time. There wasn’t actually a designated ride manager - mistake number one - and, as the work for the event had been done by committee and no one had said anything, I assumed that one of the guys from the breeders and/or Jockey Club would be taking charge. When that didn’t really happen, I stepped into the gap sort of. The thing is that all these guys are actually sort of executive types who are used to having staff take care of everything for them. Right, Toto, it really isn’t Kansas. This is when being old enough to be most people’s mother, having graying hair and that growl that most mothers of teenagers acquire, being bilingual and not owing anything to anyone politically or socially comes in handy.

So Thursday we vetted in about half of the horses and staggered home to sleep. I had to be up at 4:30 am to drive my daughter to school as she was leaving on a theatre trip to London that morning, so I just made extra coffee and went straight to the Club. We had some horses on hand at 5:30 am and by 6 were vetting in the ones who’d had to be trucked over. The FEI guys had arrived and there were some familiar faces, which was nice to see.

I warned all the vets to be tough on ageing the horses (most people here have no idea how old their horses really are unless they are registered) and to be brutal on soundness. And to send any complaints my way since as a mother of teenagers, the complainers were likely to get very short shrift. That at least relaxed our local vets who are used to being bossed around as much as listened to.

We had about 115 riders apply to the ride and about 100 started out.

We ran into the first problem in very short order when someone called in to say that the tractor pulling the water tank to the water stops had bogged down in the sand and we had to come up with alternatives. Some of the water was delivered by the tractor pulling a flatbed trailer thing, while I commandeered a bunch of people, mostly teenagers who I knew could drive in sand, to ferry out boxes of bottled water. The kids were amazing, driving all day hauling barrels and boxes of water, checking on horses and riders and keeping in contact with me by mobile phones. The water issue slowed the ride considerably and the horses got a longer rest in the middle while we made sure there was water out there for them. But the midpoint vetcheck knocked out another 15 or so horses. Frankly, given our inexperience, my feeling was the more the better.

The way the timing worked, the first group to depart came back just after the second group left and the same thing happened after the break. That did give people some breathing space, although the sand storm that blew up about noon didn’t. It wasn’t unrelenting, but one clever rider boasted about thinking to bring a toothbrush to pick the grit from her teeth at the vet check!

The only people who got no break were the kids I had running water, and myself because various people refused to believe that we weren’t allowing chase cars or that they couldn’t just come up and park on the grass even if they were from the newspaper sponsoring the ride. Actually, the politics of the whole thing got rather ugly at one point, and it was a good thing that there were some of us who had no group affiliations so we could ignore the rest. Kind of like "This ride has been brought to you by the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The whole ride wound up about 4 pm, having had the first group go out at 8 or so am, and with a lengthy break for the midpoint to replenish water supplies.

That night I wrote out a lengthy report to the committee on the things that went right and wrong. We didn’t lose any horses, despite the fact that some of our riders from some rather remote farms had no idea of what they were doing. These are guys who can’t even read and write.

I stopped one rider myself whose horse was obviously bone weary and in some trouble and took his saddle back to camp with me. We sent out a vet who put the horse on a drip and walked slowly back with it.

One problem with the desert is that we have no way to get a trailer out in the sand. That is a major concern in planning the route for the next race. But then Tevis isn’t all that accessible too.

At one point I was out just checking on things and I met a gold colored jeep that I didn’t recognize so I stopped it and demanded to know who they were and what they thought they were doing out there. (Like it was my desert!! A testament to the basic-training by Arab mothers that a number of young men didn’t just flatten me!) The driver, who spoke perfect American English, said he was with some Kuwaiti riders and one of them was lost. I firmly explained that chase cars were not allowed and said that if he wanted to be out there he could look for his rider, but while he was at it, he could pick up some boxes of empty water bottles at the next water stop.

OK. They finally found the rider, whose horse had gone to a nearby farm and refused to move out of sheer orneriness (a rental and a smart one at that), and I ran into the driver later and found out that he was filming and taking notes for the Kuwaiti equestrian club that was sending some people for the next race??? Got his revenge by telling me he had me on film reading him the riot act for messing up our desert with his car. Carried another load of trash out though. Pretty good guy, after all.

I finally finished things about 6:30 pm when the vets had finished with all the horses that needed extra work (only 3, which wasn’t bad for a group that included so many clueless riders) and packed it in. I figure I lost 2 kilos in weight and gained 3 in sand.

The next race is a real one. 100 km and not set speed. The politics of this thing are mind-boggling and could make you retch. I know why I’ve never joined the any of the groups here. I told them that if they wanted me to manage the next ride for them and be the ground manager, they’d have to more than double my pay. I really wish they’d get someone from outside to do it, but I have a feeling that I may be stuck with it again. I have warned them that I’m not making a practice of this.

Good things to come out of it all: Our wonderful student vets who are getting hooked on equine medicine and who really felt like champs after working so hard. They all volunteered to help us out with a bunch of short (25-50 km) rides that we are going to run independently next year. Now everyone knows that we really can have our own endurance rides without big money support or outside help because we vet-checked half the horses ourselves, took care of our people on the trail ourselves, and, frankly most people are pretty annoyed with the infighting among the organizing groups. A common attitude is "Who needs them?". Fine.

All in all, I’m really happy about how things went, even with the problems. Would I do it again? Probably. Am I totally nuts? Undoubtedly. Would I rather be riding? Do you really need to ask? But I know I get to go to heaven.

Copyright, 2000 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
Cairo, Egypt
EGYPT ENDURANCE 2000

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