Contract

An owner offers you the chance to train or to ride one of his horses. This window, headed Contract, is the last step: it recalls the horses concerned and waits for you to confirm.

You open it from My contracts, in your Trainer or Jockey menu: through a line's Accept or Refuse link, or through the page's actions menu to answer several offers at once.

Accepting

The role becomes yours immediately: you are now that horse's trainer or jockey, with the screens and the rights that go with it. Nothing to wait for, the owner does not have to confirm on his side — he is the one who offered.

You only accept a pending offer. A contract already accepted is not accepted again: on its line, the Accept link has disappeared and the mention Accepted has replaced it.

Refusing, and resigning

The same button serves twice, and that is worth knowing: Refuse declines an offer, but it also refuses a contract already accepted. That is how you withdraw from a commitment you no longer want — there is no other button for it, and you have nobody's permission to ask.

In both cases the contract is deleted, and the role comes back to the horse's owner. With one nuance: only if you still held it. If the owner had already entrusted the role to somebody else in the meantime, your departure does not override that choice.

A contract is therefore never a prison, in either direction. The owner can replace you, you can leave.

As a jockey, mind the test

Accepting a jockey's contract erases the horse's last test — the ride tested, the turf, the distance and the time. So you inherit a blank test sheet, and it is up to you to take the measurement again. That is deliberate: the test is the jockey's work, and it is not passed on. You will in fact get your due the day you leave, since your successor will not receive yours.

The same erasure takes place when you withdraw. A trainer's contract, for its part, erases nothing — but the training programme you define will belong to you alone, and will stop being applied if the horse changes trainer. All of that is detailed on the owner's side, in My contracts in the Owner menu.

Two safeguards

A contract is only processed if it really is addressed to you, for that horse. An answer given on a slightly old list can therefore do nothing unexpected: whatever no longer concerns you is simply set aside.

And the counter in your menu updates at once, without waiting for the next pass of the background service: what you see is up to date.

The page behind

My contracts does not only list your pending offers: it also shows the horses for which you already hold the role. So it is your duty roster as much as your inbox. The Pending / Accepted filter separates the two when you want to see only one.