Returning to the thrill of the race in Mongolia

Tag : Boy's Boots

"This summer, I was going to send him to Singapore to improve hisEnglish," the father, Enkhbayar, said of his son. "But he decidedto stay with me to help with the horses."
Horse racing is becoming increasingly popular across the sameCentral Asian steppes where Genghis Khan and his warrior hordesonce galloped. The biggest race of the year takes place thisweekend 48 kilometers, or 30 miles, west of the capital.
It is part of the annual Naadam Festival, a gathering that mattersmore to Mongolians than the Olympics. Children as young as 5 ridein races that can be dangerous, with hundreds of horses thunderingacross the open plain at once, running at speeds approaching 80kilometers, or 50 miles, per hour.
All told, more than 1,800 horses would race over the weekend.
As the competition intensifies, businessmen are importing largerhorses from foreign lands to breed with the small Mongolian horses,the prize money is getting heftier and owners are transportinghorses to competitions in trucks and trailers rather than ridingthem.
Other traditions are changing, too; horse racing was once whatMongolians called the "three manly sports" (alongside wrestling andarchery), but girl jockeys have started to appear.
At its heart, though, horse racing is still as rustic an experiencehere as drinking fermented mare's milk, and as deeply embedded inits culture.
Munkherdene and Enkhbayar, 49, spend their summers traveling acrossthe countryside from race to race, sleeping in the family's richlyappointed version of the traditional ger, one that cost thousandsof dollars and elicits approving looks from passers-by.
"The best thing is the air, and horse riding, and when it rains,"Munkherdene said one evening, as a double rainbow arced across theplains following a twilight thunderstorm.
The family drove out to the electric-green grasslands of theraceground on Tuesday from their apartment in Ulan Bator. For thisoccasion they set up two gers, the one for sleeping and another forcooking. Their eight racehorses were tethered to wooden posts,brought by a half-dozen horsemen hired as trainers.
The family owns more than 100 horses, which they keep in Tov, arural province that surrounds Ulan Bator, on property whereEnkhbayar's grandparents once lived. His father, who worked in thecapital for a state-run publishing house, took him there during thesummers, teaching him how to ride and care for the animals.
And now he is doing the same for his son. "Horse owners usuallydon't let their sons or daughters race their horses," Enkhbayarsaid.
"But I let my son start racing three years ago. It's important tohave him inherit the knowledge of horses from me. He'll continue totrain horses."
Enkhbayar, a father of four, watched as Munkherdene, wearing a redManchester United shirt, jumped off the stallion and tethered it toa post. Racing aside, he seems like any 13-year-old boy from anyworld capital. Last month, he stayed up late to watch matches ofthe Euro 2008 soccer tournament. His favorite PlayStation games are"NBA Street" and "FIFA Street."
Munkherdene turned away in disgust one night when a man slaughtereda goat and a sheep outside the family's kitchen ger - a rite ofpassage for teenage boys in the countryside.
"I've never done it," he said. "Sometimes I even want to beat theman doing it."
His family is one of dozens that set up gers at midweek here, onthe raceground called Khui Doloon Khudag, which means Navel of theSeven Wells.
Some of the families are nomads arriving from hundreds of milesaway with simple plastic tents and one or two racehorses. Othersbring dozens of horses and erect elaborate gers larger than atypical Manhattan studio apartment. (They take several hours to setup.)