Brent considering you thought that a rider was able to pull a horses head left and right with broken reins i will explain to you why saddles should not slip to the side when the rider has their irions down as long as Maree and most of the other monte riders do. imagine if you had a motor bike in your drive way and you went out and stood up on the seat of the bike. So your feet are on the seat and you are standing strate up balancing. if i was push the moto bike to the side or you were to lose concentration for a second it is very easy to fall off the side of the bike. Now sit on the moto bike normally with you feet on the pegs and your hands on the handle bars. Now if was to give the bike a nudge you would not fall off because your legs are down a fair way on both sides and well before you would fall off you would squeeze your legs or shift the top half of your body to stay up. So if you were riding a horse and the saddle was done up properly and if the saddle was not done up properly you would notice in the warm up and you would also put a bit of weight from one leg to the other to see if the saddle is done up tight or not. Even if the saddle is done up properly a rider could still put all his weight on 1 leg and the saddle would roll a bit. If you watch most of the monte riders in Australia they are riding so long with their irions and that's because most of them would not have ridden race horses at trackwork and learnt to ride with there irons a bit shorter. I could not imagine anything more uncomfortable than riding in a monte race the way most of your riders are riding them. I will gauantee you that if monte racing keeps growing here than riding them the style they are now will be extinct within 12 months and years later people will look back and shake their heads at how that style even was allowed. Have a think back to all the old race horse photos you have seen from 30 40 50 years ago when all the jockeys had their stirrups down really long. Have you heard of a saying called the last of the straight backs. Thats what racing people say to some one when they are riding with there irions down long. Its a nice way of saying to someone that you look like some cowboy riding a horse back in 1880. And thats why people that dont know much about harness racing think that monte racing is funny to watch. Could you imagine Jim Cassidy riding that group 1 winner on Saturday coming down the strate looking like monte rider. He would get laughed out of Sydney.