Introduction

The dominant images of racing, generated by journalists, novelists and film makers, come from the racecourse. This chapter concentrates upon the more mundane social logic of the Newmarket training yard. It describes the central figure in this context, the racing lad. Whilst Wacquant sought out the amateur fighters of the training gym (1992, 1995a, b), a large portion of my fieldwork was spent amongst lads, whose structural position relative to professional jockeys is similar to that between amateur and professional fighters. Being a lad in Newmarket does not just affect how the working day is spent, it is a role which affects the whole person, their physique, temporality, and perception of themselves and of others. In other words it can be seen as a particular habitus (Bourdieu 1984), where habitus is understood as the internalisation of tastes appropriate to a particular class, expressed through the medium of the body seen as so much physical capital.

Both riding and boxing are skilled bodily crafts that provide a structure for experience in which linguistic explanations for action are excluded by the immediacy of physical involvement. By riding and boxing, myself and Wacquant engaged in ‘edgework’ (Lyng 1990: 863) that drove out the requirements of rational choice or normative theories of action, thus demanding an explanation in terms of a logic of practice. Both boxing and riding provide examples of skills in which ‘successful practice normally excludes knowledge of its own logic’ (Bourdieu 1977: 19).