re-training a race horse

[blueeyes2k]

Hi,
I have recently aquirred an ex-racehorse, he is very sweet and not at all crazy. His flat work is advancing slowly, but my next task is to teach him to jump he was a hurdler and still jumps like a hurdler. I wondered if anybody had any helpful tricks or tips to help me along the way. Thanks :D
Sam

[Speedy]

Only thing I can think of is to take him right back to basics - loads of polework (with loads of poles eg. eight so he doesn't try and jump them as a spread). When he's going quietly over these, then introduce small fences and use placing poles. He'll probably still throw in the odd long one though! I used to ride an ex point-to-pointer and if you sat quietly on him and rode your fences well then he jumped really nicely, but every now and then he'd take off three miles away and scare the life out of me! He got better the more we did with him

[Piaffe]

My ex-racehorse does this! He gets very worried and goes flat out, or stops!! I tend to do as speedy says, put out poles - lots of pole work - also put a jump up in the sandschool (only a medium height one) which he can 'look' at. If he gets too excited/worried, I circle him away and ride lots of circles in canter/trot until he calms down. This tends to work but takes time - I have to admit I don't do too much jumping on him as he had a bad experience when racing - he's very capable and sometimes enjoys it, but I don't like to push it.

[Tina J]

Lots of very basic pole work, as Piaffe and Speedy said. Also make sure that when you do circles he is truly coming off your legs and engaged from his quarters. Then when you start doing more jumps, do them from a circle and keep on the circle so that he stays engaged and doesn't try to bomb off.

The other schooling method is to stop straight after jumping any jump. Even if you have to use the walls of the arena to help you! And put in lots of stops when doing basic flat work. So that he never knows when you are going to ask for halt, and so that he doesn't anticipate that a slight tightening of your seat means bomb off.

Good luck.

[blueeyes2k]

Hi,
Thanks for all the advice i'll give it a go and let you know how i get on
Sam