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Motawaazy or ‘Wazzy’ as he is known at home, is Catterick's Equine Ambassador as part of the ROR Horses for Courses programme. Motawaazy ran 11 times at Catterick between June 2021 and May 2024, winning on 4 occasions. He has now retired from racing and has moved home with his owner Victoria Greetham and her daughter Zara. We will be checking in regularly with him to see how he is enjoying life after racing!

In this blog, we hear how Zara and Wazzy go cross country and ear their first rosette! You can read the previous blogs here. 

Wazzy has now started his life out of racing. In the last couple of months he has been doing some basic schooling and hacking out with a local group of horses, which he really enjoys. He has been excellent in most traffic so far including passing tractors and big wagons. He has taken a dislike to cows and doesn't like to hack past them, but is getting much better with this! 

Of course this is all very new to him and completely different to a life as a racehorse. The first couple of times that he hacked out on his own he was quite nervous and nappy, however this has really improved and he is now hacking alone nicely. In racing, they all go out as a string so he wasn't used to going on his own and spent the whole hack whinnying for his best friend. He now knows that he will be re-united with his friend in an hour so is much calmer.

We have taken him to a couple of cross country schooling events, the best one being Craven Country Ride in Skipton which is great fun. This is a 10km off road trail ride with optional jumps. Wazzy absolutely loved this. He has never jumped before (being a flat horse) so had no clue what he was supposed to do at first, but after following his best friend Nipper, who is a great jumper, he was happily jumping logs and small jumps. He seems very brave, even jumping into the water jump once he got the hang of it.

After Zara watched this she decided that she wanted to take him to a cross country event. We explained that she was a bit young at 5 years old but she was insistent, so she entered her first ever lead rein cross country, getting a clear round with Wazzy, led by her instructor Ben who is so good with her (like most children, she takes no notice at all of her Mum!). She was over the moon to be awarded her first ever rosette, taking it to school the following day to do a "show and tell". Of course this was Wazzy's first rosette too! Wazzy was great and he really looked after her walking and trotting steadily around the 3km course. People couldn't believe that he was an ex racehorse!