Bauyrzhan Murzabayev has been riding horses for about 29 of his 33 years, so it’s fair to say the last 14 months with his feet out of the irons and firmly on the ground have been an alien experience.
But after a shattering fall broke his T5 and T6 vertebrae on November 30, 2024, he recognises there was good fortune in the fact that he is even in the position to look at a probable return to race-riding. With surgery behind him, he is focusing on regaining fitness and is looking ahead with positivity towards an April comeback at Hoppegarten, Berlin.
“All is positive, all nice,” Murzabayev told Idol Horse, “I keep it all positive.”
Germany’s four-time champion first took the reins of a horse at four or five years old and was a precocious race-riding talent in his homeland of Kazakhstan.
“This is the longest time I’ve been off a horse since I first was together with a horse, I’m out of everything (to do with riding) right now,” Murzabayev continued.
“I was riding races, the long-distance races in Kazakhstan, when I was seven years old, riding the big horses, not ponies. After I rode those races, I changed to normal horse races, so this last year has been strange. But now we can start again.”
Yet Murzabayev has resisted any urge to accelerate his return – he has spent time with family in Kazakhstan while his body recovered – and he is not going to start rushing things now. Six weeks after the surgery to remove the pinning metal that has helped the bones heal, he is still six weeks away from that first leg-up into the saddle since the day he crashed to the ground at Al Rayyan racetrack in Qatar.
“All the plates and screws are out. The doctor is happy,” he said.
Not happy for him to start riding though, not yet.
“I don’t have the green light yet from doctors for that, they said if I want to be 100 per cent, I need to take three months after the surgery,” Murzabayev continued. “It has been six weeks, so I have another six weeks. That’s one and a half months, so I think in the middle of March I hope to be riding, back on the gallops. That would mean April I will be back racing, April is important in Germany, the start of the classic season.
“The last time I was riding a horse was when I had the fall, so that’s more than a year, it’s a very, very long time.”
Murzabayev has not yet started any intensive fitness work: that will come next. The recovery from surgery was important and after such a long time he was not prepared to risk that by upping his fitness training too much.
“I can improve the fitness day after day now,” he said. “After the operation it had to be slowly, but we can start. I wanted, all the time, to be improving through the recovery back to full fitness: not do too much and be stopping in the middle; keep on improving day after day until I am ready.”
Murzabayev is looking forward to reconnecting with his boss in Germany, trainer Peter Schiergen, as well as the Qatari handler making a name for himself globally with the backing of Wathnan Racing, Hamad Al Jehani.
“If I am back in April, I will be back as first jockey to Peter Schiergen,” he said. “Also, I might get some rides from my Qatar trainer Hamad Al Jehani, he had horses running last year in France and the UK, and won a Group race in Germany, so there’s a chance to ride for him.”
And looking further ahead, Murzabayev is hoping to tap into his Japan connections again. His last short licence in the Japan Racing Association (JRA) in early 2024 yielded 21 wins.
“In the winter, maybe,” he added. “I will try to go back to Japan then.” ∎
