Gold Circle Pty (Ltd)

Today's Racing :

Nieuwenhuis floating along

David Thiselton
Ryk Nieuwenhuis, a former jockey, is in charge of Gold Circle's transport services. Allocating and keeping track of the the trucks under his care is one of the aspects of his job that keeps him very busy. On a raceday, the service will have seven horse-carrying floats on the road including three 17 berth trucks and four 16 berth trucks.
Horses are fetched from the training centres of Summerveld, Clairwood and Ashburton on racedays and taken to the races.
Nieuwenhuis’s task is to allocate the horses to the floats so that if the meeting is at Scottsville, the Clairwood horses will leave three-and-a-half hours before their respective races, the Summerveld horses will leave three hours before theirs and the Ashburton horses two-and-a-half hours before theirs. If the racemeeting is in Durban these times are reversed per distance from the track.
The allocation becomes more difficult for the big racemeetings.
However, in the scenario where two trucks must be used to carry the horses for three races, with the horses for the middle of these races split between two trucks, the departure time will come forward by half-an-hour. The horses are led onto the float, which has sideways facing berths, by their grooms, who then stay with them for the duration of the journey.
Most of the horses wear protective headgear to prevent them from injury. The horses generally appear to be well behaved when loading and enter fairly smoothly. A command of “box!’’ is shouted to encourage them into their berths, while a whip is cracked, without contact being made, behind the ones that prove stubborn.
The horses are put back on the float 25 minutes after their race.
They are first given a hosing down and water to drink, while specimens have to be taken from some of them.
On Vodacom Durban July day there were 36 loads to and from the races and Nieuwenhuis only had six trucks at his disposal after one of them had a slow puncture.
The transport facilities are far cry from the distant days when horses arriving from the Johannesburg sales were delivered by train to the Shongweni Station and then walked all the way to Summerveld by their grooms. Runners from the big stables in the KZN Midlands were also transported by train. Before the establishment of Summerveld they were walked to either Scottsville, Greyville or Clairwood from the respective stations.
Nieuwenhuis is also responsible for the transport of such necessities as tractors and verti-drain machines on any given day, as well as for the television truck on racedays.

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