Vendetta on Horseback

In most horse races, a whip lash in the face is considered bad manners, at least. When it happened twice last week to a jockey in Siena, Italy, he quit and let his whip-wielding rival win. Instead of being barred for life for such tactics, the winner was wined & dined, and a sonnet composed in his honor was distributed throughout the town.

In the Siena Polio, the world's oldest horse race,* anything goes. Since the jockeys ride for the honor of the Siena town wards (which bear such symbolic names as Giraffe, Dragon, Unicorn and Wave), partisan passions begin to rise well before race day. This year Unicorn hired away (for a rumored 900,000 lire) the Giraffe's jockey, a movie stunt rider and a two-time winner named Pietrino. Pietrino, a Polio veteran much in demand, had been known to change colors before.

This time, his defection caused rioting between the Unicorns and Giraffes. But by race time, with 40,000 onlookers crammed around the fan-shaped course in the town square, order had been pretty much restored. The horses were led into neighboring chapels for special blessings, and the jockeys put on their iron helmets and lined up for the start. Jockey Pietrino, as it turned out, needed all the protection he could carry.

Two-thirds of the way around the three-lap course, right in front of the medieval town hall, it happened that Pietrino came shoulder-to-shoulder with the rider for a ward he had once deserted. Pietrino suddenly found himself clamped against the inside rail, was knocked off his horse and carried away with a broken ankle.

By the stretch, the race had settled down to a match between Dragon's speedy young mare Nituzza and Wave's pace-setting Miranda. Twice Nituzza's jockey tried to pass; twice Miranda's jockey flailed him across the face with his long, beef-sinew whip. Miranda won by a length. The winner's purse: 360 lire (about 55-c-).

* By some Sienese accounts, the Polio dates from about 1585, when it began to replace an earlier Sienese fad, mass bullfighting.

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