In the Monkey Seat

Look at an eighteenth-century painting of English horse racing  and you will see a jockey riding far back on the horse and sitting  upright, perpendicular to the ground, “a point of calm stability  as the horse stretched its legs out ahead and behind.” A dandy,  a big spender, a ladies’ man, an Indiana boy who became the most  famous jockey in the United States and Great Britain and helped  transform horse racing into a wildly popular spectator sport,  Tod Sloan (1874-1933) invented a better way to sit a horse, as  John Dizikes, Ph.D. ’64, explains in Yankee  Doodle Dandy: The Life and Times of Tod Sloan (Yale University  Press, $22.50). 

From the book

What did Tod Sloan do to convert a mediocre career into  a stellar one? He adopted a new style of riding, the “forward  crouch.” As he recalled it years later, what he did and how he  did it merged into one dramatic moment. One day he and another  jockey were galloping their horses together when his horse started  to bolt; in trying to regain control Tod climbed up out of the  saddle and onto the horse’s neck. His fellow jockey laughed at  the strange sight, and “I laughed louder than he.” On reflection  Tod realized that “when I was doing that neck crouch, the horse’s  stride seemed to be freer and that it was easier for me too. 

“I put two and two together and thought there must be something  in it, and I began to think it out, trying all sorts of experiments  on horses at home. The ‘crouch seat,’ or the ‘monkey mount,’ or  the thousand and one other ways it has been described, was the  result. Then the time came when I determined to put it into practice.  But I couldn’t screw up enough courage the first time I had a  chance. I kept putting it off. At last, though, I did really spring  it on them. Everybody laughed. They thought I had turned comedian.  But I was too cocksure to be discouraged. I was certain that I  was on the right track. I persevered, and at last I began to win  races!” 

The forward crouch was a remarkably simple innovation. The jockey,  with short stirrups and short reins, moved up until he was high  on the horse’s withers, the highest part of the back, between  the shoulder blades, leaning forward on the neck of the horse,  looking down over its head. It is how all jockeys ride today and  have done for a century. It is as difficult for us to imagine  another way of riding as it was for many of Sloan’s contemporaries  to imagine any alternative to what they had known.