THE RULE OF ONE FOOT ON THE GROUND

Knowing when to let go of our ambitions

The Cheltenham Gold Cup is the name of a steeplechase race, the most prestigious of its kind in England, which is open to horses aged five years or older. These are supposed to gallop a distance of three miles, two and a half furlongs while jumping over 22 fences along the way. The race takes place once a year, in March, as part of the four-day Cheltenham Festival. The race has known a few four-legged heroes of bygone days, and their statues adorn the lawns around the well-kempt track. Naturally, it is also one of the most widely covered races in the country, and the 2012 race drew special interest because of a particular horse—Kauto Star, a relatively old horse of 12, brown with a white stripe on his shapely nose, whose competence may have suffered when he was injured during training two and a half weeks before the race. But an incomparable competitive spirit and Ruby Walsh, one of the best jockeys in the country, mounted on his back make this horse the talk of the town.

Kauto Star won this race twice already, in 2007 and 2009. After an illustrious career (the winner in 23 of the 40 races he entered) that earned his owners more than $5 million, everyone understands that Kauto’s race today is probably his last. If he wins it, he will have set a record for years to come and cemented his standing as the world’s greatest jump-racing horse. Kauto Star’s main rival is Long Run, five years his junior, who beat him in this race the previous year by eight full lengths. But Kauto came back from temporarily being put out to pasture and beat his young rival in two important races in the months leading up to today’s race. Although the stats are not encouraging—only two horses his age have won the race in its 88 years of existence and not one of them since 1969; the course at Cheltenham is especially long; and its famous finish up the hill grants young horses a natural advantage—Kauto has already shown that if any horse can write a new page in the book of equine statistics, he is that horse.

Kauto has more than 10,000 fans on his Facebook page who are rooting for him to win, but just as much for him not to fall and get injured. According to the data published by the British Horseracing Authority, a horse’s odds of dying in a steeplechase race are 4/1,000. If you consider the number of races such a horse runs, you will understand why a horse’s chances of ending its life munching grass in peace are not very high. And indeed, the lives of most racehorses come to an end before they are five. Leg structure is responsible for racehorses’ speed, but also for their vulnerability. During a race a horse may place on its legs a weight three to ten times greater than its body weight. It is very tough to treat a fracture in a horse’s leg, and the likelihood of developing gangrene or infection is strong. Such an injury is usually a death sentence for a horse. On the preceding Race Day at Cheltenham three horses failed to clear hurdles, were injured and received a lethal injection to put them out of their misery.

But today it appears that everyone wants Kauto to win, even those betting on another horse. It seems like his victory would signal to everyone that eternal life is an actual possibility.

Sixty-five thousand spectators, a record crowd at Cheltenham, come to watch the race on March 16, 2012. The winner is Synchronised, who was given odds of 1/8 by bookmakers. Long Run finishes third. And Kauto Star? Well, Kauto never makes it to the finish line. The horse is in the lead and jumps the first hurdles well, but after the ninth fence the jockey Ruby Walsh decides, to the audience’s chagrin, to stop racing, return the decorated horse to the area where the race ends, and unsaddle him. Walsh says he felt the horse straining more than usual over the water hurdle, and feared that leaving him in the race would end in a fatal injury. His fears receive sad confirmation when Synchronised, the winning horse, falls to his death just a month later in the Grand National race.

Despite understandable attempts by the media to anthropomorphize the horses taking part in the race (“you want to watch him compete over and over, like Federer”), my interest is focused entirely on the human rider—the person who had to decide between gloria mundi for the horse and for himself and the risk of losing this special horse. And to focus more closely still, I am interested in the question of whether his decision as to the circumstances in which he would withdraw from the race was made even before the horses came out of the gate, or during the race, when he surmised that the hopes of winning had begun to recede. If he determined in advance under what circumstances he would pull out, Walsh needed tremendous willpower to forfeit the race and the big prize along with it. Except that Walsh’s skill level and close familiarity with Kauto point to the possibility that his decision came during the race: the attentive and experienced jockey recognized Kauto’s decline in ability, minuscule as it may have been, and decided not to take the risk. But what about all the rest of us, who are forced to make important decisions even though we are not equipped with the immense skill and sensitivity that were at Walsh’s disposal when he made his?

“When a ground crew is getting ready to launch a hot-air balloon, they have to hold on to the basket to prevent it from taking flight prematurely. They grasp the edge of the basket with both hands and plant a foot on a hold near the base. Only, ever, one. The one sacred unbreakable rule of balloon ground handling is: always keep one foot on the ground.”

The insight reflected in this important rule that Jeff Wise offered his readers (in the January 2011 issue of Psychology Today) is meant to ensure the safety of the ground crews of these capricious aircraft, should a rapid change in weather disrupt their stability. “If a gust of wind catches the balloon and it starts to rise,” an expert on the matter explains to Wise, “and you get lifted six inches into the air, you think, ‘Oh, that’s no big deal, I can just step down if I need to.’ Then before you know it you’re at six feet, and you think, ‘I could twist an ankle, I’d better hang on and wait ‘til it gets lower.’ Then you’re at thirty feet, and if you jump you’re going to break a leg. But if you don’t jump…”

That is the mental trap to which Wise was referring—hanging on too long in the hope that a bad situation will get better without assessing the devastating consequences expected if the improvement is late in coming. The rule described here was never more relevant than on one spring morning in 1932, when the biggest helium-filled airship in the world, the USS Akron, tried to land in an open field near a military base in San Diego, California. The immense ship, 785 feet long, which had been christened just a year earlier and represented the height of aviation technology at the time, emerged, as it slowly descended, out of the fading morning mists. Each time it approached the ground, the 200 naval academy cadets who had been assigned that morning readied, for the first time in their lives, to dock an airship by means of the ropes that trailed from it. But the first three attempts were disrupted by sudden gusts of wind that diverted the ship, and only on the fourth try did the ground crew manage to grab hold of the ropes and drag the enormous craft to the ground. But then, because of a malfunction in one of the docking rings, the ship listed on one side and made things very difficult for the crewmen on the other side. Out of desperation, several of them climbed up the rope in an effort to put all of their body weight on it, but in vain. The ship slowly rose, and the sun’s heat began warming the helium left inside it. The young and inexperienced ground crew dropped the trail ropes and hit the ground (when they did not land by mistake on a fellow crewman).

But as the Akron took off, after it had offloaded its human cargo, the many spectators at the event were horrified to discover that three of the naval cadets were left hanging in mid-air. The first dropped to his death from a height of 160 feet. The next to crash on the hard ground, in a little cloud of dust, was the camp’s star athlete, Sailor Nigel Henton. Only one man remained amid the dwindling ropes from the ship. The dumbstruck crowd watched the ship rise in the growing heat of the day to a height of 2,300 feet. The tension was unbearable. From this height, all the spectators could see was a tiny dark spot dangling beneath the body of the ship. Its detachment from there seemed unavoidable. But the sailor on the rope, Charles Cowart, a boxer who was in training for the Navy championship, refused to give up. He bound himself to the rope in a way that conserved his strength, and after two hours of landing attempts realized that his only chance of surviving was to climb slowly up to the ship, and so he did. When it finally landed in the evening, the resourceful survivor stubbornly refused to talk about the terrible hours he had spent in the air. The Akron itself was shattered a year later when it ran into a storm off the coast of New Jersey, and that put an end to the era of airships.

“If you happen to be a balloon handler, the answer is obvious,” says Wise. But the important and hidden message applies to all of us: “When a situation starts to turn bad, it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that it might get better on its own—until suddenly we find ourselves in such dire straits that our only hope is to cling on for dear life.” Whether you have invested in shares or in a relationship, the principle of “one foot on the ground” goes for you too. Instead of trusting in your willpower muscle that is prone to erosion even in the most steadfast among us, determine ahead of time the price or circumstances at which you will let go of the rope. If the book is not sufficiently interesting by page 70, I forgo reading the rest. If the bank mistakenly bounces a check of mine more than twice, I leave it. And if an entrepreneur I’ve invested in shows me more than two erroneous representations, I don’t continue investing in him.