RACING PEDIGREE: Franz Klammer
The famous name of Franz Klammer is appearing in the top spot place in races once again. But this time it’s not the great Austrian ski racing hero, now aged 67, competing but a British racehorse named after him.
The horse, Franz-Klammer, has not had the meteoric rise to fame that the skier Franz Klammer enjoyed nearly 50 years ago. The horse had reached age nine, quite mature for a racehorse and taken part in 25 professional races without a win.
The change of fortune came with a switch up from racing over low hurdles to high fences in the steeplechase discipline. Franz-Klammer-the-horse has excelled in the tougher challenge, winning his first three steeplechase races this year, the first two by a huge margin of 25 lengths.
Told of the existence of a horse with his name, Klammer commented: “It’s certainly a different kind of racing from hurtling down a mountain. I’m flattered to have a racehorse named after me.”
In a further twist, the jockey riding Franz Klammer to his victories is one Alexander Thorne, the son of long-time Skier & Snowboarder magazine News Editor Patrick Thorne, a lifetime Klammer fan who first met the great man in the 1980s a decade before Alexander was born.
Given that there are some 14,000 racehorses in training, the odds against that must be pretty high.
FOUR LEGGED FRIEND: Alexander Thorne (in red) has been riding Franz Klammer to victory
Categories: News