Retire

The window that retires a horse from racing — and also the one that cancels that decision: it is the same one both ways, its title and its button changing according to what you asked for.

It accepts a selection, not just one horse: from a list, tick ten and deal with them at once. Each is judged separately, and those that cannot go through are named in the error message without preventing the others.

What retirement does straight away

It is immediate: the horse's retirement date is set one minute in the past. It no longer races, and it will no longer be offered for entry.

And it does not stop there. The game settles everything that attached the horse to activity, in the same movement:

• The trainer and the jockey become the owner again: the contracts are broken.
• Its sale is cancelled, if it had one.
• Its reserved matings are cancelled.
• Its test under way is erased.
• The visibility of its genetics goes back to private.

That is a great deal for one single confirmation, and it is the reason for the warning displayed at the top of the window. A horse retired by mistake does not only lose its career: it loses its contracts and its reservations.

When the game refuses

Five situations, and each has its logic:

• A mare in foal. She is expecting a foal, the game does not let her go.
• An auction that has received an offer. Retiring would cancel the sale, and somebody has already bid.
• An entry in a claiming race. The same reason, more sharply: the horse is promised for sale by the race's rules. That refusal has its own message.
• You are not the owner. The trainer and the jockey do not have that right.
• A clan horse can only be retired by the clan's owner. See Clan's horses.

Cancelling: what it really gives back

Cancelling does not extend a career, it gives the horse back its normal retirement date — sixteen months after its arrival, that is its seventeenth year. And that is where you have to pay attention:

• For a horse retired before its time, that date is still ahead of it: it sets off again, and it races once more.
• For a horse that had already passed seventeen, the date given back is already behind: it stays retired. Cancelling changes nothing.

In other words: an early retirement can be caught back, the end of a career cannot. Cancelling also resets its training, which lets it take up the work where it had stopped.

How long you can come back

As long as the horse is still in your stable, and that depends on its races. A pass of the program, each night, definitively archives the retired horses — but it only takes those none of whose races appear in the game's archives any more, and races stay there for about two months.

So: a horse that has raced recently can be caught back for all that time. A horse that has never raced goes on the very next night. Which stands to reason: the second one, you retired because you did not want it.

What happens next is beyond recall: all that remains of the horse is a memorial card, with no genetics, therefore nothing to race with. The detail is in The horses, which also explains why retirement is a deferred deletion rather than a way of filing a horse away — to set a horse aside without losing it, there is My folders.