Quarter Horses don’t face most of the problems in Thoroughbred breeding.
Just as pedigree dog breeding takes major cues from purebred horse breeding, we can see institutional problems in thoroughbreds that directly mirror the issues we see in the dog fancy.
Lack of Improvement
[In 1994] Virginia Rapids won the seven-furlong in 1:22.26. Eightyeight years earlier…Roseben covered seven furlongs in 1:22. One hundred and five years later, the world record for seven furlongs…was just 2 3/5 seconds faster, 1:19 2/5.
[In] 1895 Domino [ran] 1:09 for six furlongs. The world record 116 years later is 2 2/5 seconds faster, G Malleah’s 1:06 3/5 set… in 1995.
[In] 1918, Roamed covered one mile in 1:34 4/5. Dr. Fager’s record 50 years later was only 2 3/5 seconds faster.
Other current world records at the most common distances thoroughbreds race on dirt have stood for as long as three decades. Chinook Pass’s five-furlong mark of :55 1/5 at Longacres in Washington was set in 1982, 13 years before Plenty Zloty went five-and-a-half furlongs in 1:01 at Turf Paradise in Arizona.
Hoedown’s Day’s mile-and-a-sixteenth record in 1:38 2/5 at Bay Meadows came in 1983. Simply Majestic recorded the mile-and-an-eighth mark in California in 1:45 at Golden Gate in 1988. Spectacular Bid’s 1:57 4/5 victory at Santa Anita in 1980 remains the fastest mile-and-a-quarter, while Secretariat’s 1973 mile-and-a-half world record of 2:24 in his 31-length Belmont Stakes blowout to complete the Triple Crown still stands.
In fact, no other Belmont Stakes winner before or after has come within two seconds – the equivalent of 10 lengths – of Secretariat’s performance that historic afternoon.
The oft stated goal of selective breeding is to “improve the breed,” but we find very little evidence of improvement in purebred horses and dogs. The governing body of thoroughbred racing and the keepers of the American Studbook, the Jockey Club, list as their official motto: “Dedicated to the Improvement of Thoroughbred Breeding and Racing since 1894.” The most obvious metric of such improvement would be to examine record race times which we would expect to see steadily improving each generation along with advancements in technology, training, nutrition, vet care and the fruits of wise breeding decisions. We don’t readily see the fruits of such improvement in Thoroughbreds, although records in Standardbred and Quarter Horse racing fall regularly.
The American Quarter Horse is a relatively new breed with their stud book established in 1940 and perpetually open to new blood through a performance standard appendix registry. The AQHA lists world record times for races at 12 distances. Ten of those 12 records have been broken in the last 4 years.
The origins of the Standardbreds date back to the last decades of the 1700s, and by 1880 they earned their name due to the 2:30 time standard to trot a mile to be entered into the stud book. Today these horses regularly trot the mile in only 1:50 and steady progress toward even faster times happens regularly.
Standardbreds are getting faster. Thoroughbreds aren’t. What that means is open to debate, but the facts are startling.
In the past 40 years, Standardbreds have closed the equivalent of 40 lengths on Thoroughbreds. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that Thoroughbreds aren’t racing that much faster than they did 100 years ago.
Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds share their ancestry. All Standardbreds trace their pedigrees to the imported English stallion Messenger, who was brought to America in 1788.
Standardbreds race exclusively on dirt, almost always at one mile.
…
Why aren’t Thoroughbreds getting faster?
“It’s hard to explain,” Jolley said. “Human beings, without selective breeding, have improved their performance.” Thoroughbreds haven’t. “We’re not breeding them any better.”
Conformation Hurts Performance
While you wouldn’t think that aesthetics would play much of a role in horse racing where the most obvious goal would be to create an increasingly faster horse, the changing culture of Thoroughbreds has allowed appearance and the promise of pedigree to trump performance:
Through the first 60 years of the 20th century, most of the major stallions and many of the best mares were owned and controlled by some of the oldest families and richest sporting patrons in America, by the Whitneys and Woodwards, the Bradleys and Wideners, the Klebergs and Mellons. They bred horses to race them, not to sell them, and they did so in order to compete against one other — to beat their fellow members of The Jockey Club, to see who had the fastest horse. A cardinal article of their faith was to “improve the breed,” which meant to breed a horse with great speed, stamina and soundness. In fact, on the C.V. Whitney farm in Lexington, a foal born with a crooked leg was usually taken into the woods and shot, lest he or she pollute the Whitney bloodlines with this inherent deformity.
By the middle of the last century, this tight-knit racing world began to change. As these families died out and their blue-chip breeding stock was sold at dispersal auctions, the best stallions and mares fell into the hands of commercial breeders, whose central motivation was to breed, not so much a sound or durable horse, but rather an attractive horse, a “cosmetic horse,” who showed well, who had a pedigree filled with fashionable names, preferably sire lines that glowed with speed, and who thus would draw the biggest price at the fanciest yearlings sales. Because they needed to look like show horses, these hothouse yearlings were often raised in small pens and not allowed to run free, or to kick, bite and roughhouse with their peers.
So, not only did the industry begin to breed horses less sound, in general, but also horses that were raised more softly, with kid gloves.
Impatience Drives Injury
Another common element between the canine fancy and the Thoroughbred world is the shift in culture toward exploiting youth and failing to allow animals to mature before evaluating, training, and competing with them. In Conformation mere infants can earn championships for what is supposed to be their mature structure, driving selection for dogs that have excessive puppy coat and which mature too quickly. Sport handlers train too hard, too soon, and destroy joints and hips before the animals are sound and able to handle the stress.
I think there’s probably a much stronger tendency to have two year old racing nowadays than there used to be … and the lure of prize money. There’s a great incentive to race their horses too young too immature. In the old days, you bought your yearlings, you broke them in, you castrated them, you turned them out. You didn’t think about them until late two year old and mostly three-year-olds. The big money came with three-year-old racing. The current owners want two-year-old racing and I think it’s a pity. I think it’s a pity because it certainly does cause the breakdown of a lot of two-year-olds.
– Dr. Percy Sykes, Racing Vet. Buckingham, Jeffcott (1990)
The issue isn’t particularly American, we see the same issues affecting young Thoroughbreds in Australia:
As a result, most two-year-olds will sustain injuries in their first year of racing and many of them will not race in the subsequent year. In Australia, a study of two and three-year-old thoroughbred racehorses reported that 85 per cent suffered from at least one episode of illness or injury. (1)
The benefit of racing two-year-olds is simply economic. It means that owners can hopefully see a return on their investment twelve months earlier, therefore making it cheaper to prepare a horse for its first race. To further encourage investment in racehorse ownership, races for two-year-olds offer some of the highest prize money. The Magic Millions Classic held in Queensland, Australia boasts a prize purse of $2,000,000.
Unfortunately, the prize money for two year old racing, and the already high stud value placed on winners of feature races, continues to climb along with the rate of wastage due to breakdown. One Australian study of two-year-old thoroughbreds indicated that 40 per cent of horses were unsound at the end of the season. (2)
A survey of veterinarians and trainers estimated that shin soreness or dorsal metacarpal disease (DMD) affected 80 per cent of two-year-olds in Australia. (3)
Despite the drive to train and race horses younger and younger, they still are not reaching their potential until they mature physically. Of the eighteen distances world records are recorded for Thoroughbreds, 17 are held by horses four years old or greater. There are 26 Thoroughbreds that appear on the North American Dirt Records tally of fastest distances from 2 furlongs up to 2 miles, and only 4 of them are 3 or younger and two of those share the record with horses that are years older. The horses with the fastest times at both the shortest and longest distances were 7 years old when the set the records. So not only are they sacrificing the health of the horses, they’re also sacrificing the quality of the sport by shifting the culture toward racing juveniles.
“The philosophy of training Thoroughbreds has changed considerably. You can’t train them as hard as you used to. They also say you should’t run them as often. That makes no sense to me. Every other athlete competes more often.”
It’s as absurd as the NFL taking over high school football because there’s more money to be had there. After you kill a few freshman with professional caliber workouts, you back off the standards and blow through a lot more kids just to keep the game going. It’s a very harsh form of performance culling where only a few kids in a hundred even survive to play college or the pros, and even fewer make it to adulthood. And never mind that the quality of the games nose-dives either, give it a generation and no one will remember what they’re missing.
The vast majority of dog breeds find themselves in the same position as the Thoroughbred: no discernible improvement in recent memory, sacrificed health and performance to appearance standards, and an unhealthy focus on juveniles.
In the next Thoroughbreds post I’ll discuss the closed gene pool, the disposable culture, and the declining interest in the sport, factors which also affect the canine fancy.
* * *
Comments and disagreements are welcome, but be sure to read the Comment Policy. If this post made you think and you'd like to read more like it, consider a donation to my 4 Border Collies' Treat and Toy Fund. They'll be glad you did. You can subscribe to the feed or enter your e-mail in the field on the left to receive notice of new content. You can also like BorderWars on Facebook for more frequent musings and curiosities.
* * *
I think some of the following apply:
1. The ever younger race horse bit is due to the fact that a horse (such as I’ll have another) is worth more in the stud barn than as a race horse, so early retirement (as with Secretariat) as soon as the horse has established it’s worth as a stud is probably a big driver in the “they don’t last” syndrome. Fewer horses are selected to LAST as race horses. It’s fine if they do (like John Henry) when they are geldings or not useful for breeding, but the selection in the breed barn is for studs that retired young.
2. it may be that the speed is the top speed that the horse is able to accomplish without some of the drugs that were used previously. While quarter horses are getting faster, the race version of the QH is heavily throughbred. I don’t know if the same applies to Standardbred, but I haven’t heard that a 1 mile race would result in a Standardbred winning.
3. While having a clear “triple crown winner” would have been great, the fact is that race horses don’t NEED to be hugely faster. Their value is in gambling, and if you have a Secretariat, there’s no serious betting (as the small entry in Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes run shows). If you can have an Alydar / Affirmed, that’s great, but 10 horses that all run within a half second of each other are more valuable “for the industry” than one that runs 2 seconds faster than anything else.
4. Given the new rules about drugs and soundness, focusing on a horse that can run without drugs may be the current trend vice one that can’t. I don’t know if the inspections are as intense on quarter horse & Standardbred tracks, but since the dollars involved are less, probably not. And the value of a “retired race horse” may differ significantly between the three breeds.
The “Impressive” problem would indicate that Quarter Horse breeding isn’t really any better than any other horse breeding. What happens to reject Thoroughbreds has pretty high visibility these days. Is it the same for reject QH and Standardbreds? You don’t see either of the latter in cross country or show jumping, or in the (increasingly rare because of accidents) steeplechase.
But if you train really hard, you can get one to plow a turnip field.
Retrieverman recently posted..I’m glad I didn’t waste time watching this crap
Humans run faster than they used to, but it isn’t because of better genetics, but better nutrition, training and even equipment (shoes, clothes, etc). There have also been many “doping” cases over the years. In horse racing, there have been arguements on better technology (artificial turf) but many of the “standard” medications are now prohibited. It’s really an issue of what’s cost effective. You don’t see double muscle cattle (like the Belgian Blue) on a regular basis because such muscling has side effects in birthing issues and the quality of the meat. Faster horses may mean negative side effects (such as injuries). Handicapping means that the faster horse in most races just has to carry more weight — the trick is to have a horse “just” better enough to win (for the owners, etc) or place so as to bring in dollars or to win spectacularly enough to be used as stud and bring in income that way. Horses like John Henry are the exception — a horse that isn’t going to be used for stud and therefore has value only as long as it wins well enough to bring in dollars. You see a lot more horses in claiming races or “maiden hasn’t won in three races” type events than you do in something like the Derby. I don’t see that conformation breeding has affected breeding for RACE horses — shear practical business interest would indicate that like cattle, success is the “Darwinian” driver here. The thing is that speed is only one of the factors in a successful race horse. Bodemeister is linebred on Secretariat but there’s no evidence that he inherited Secretariat’s mutation with the large heart (which is apparently an X gene mutation). If speed were the issue only, you’d see more attempts to capture that mutation.
That’s why this finding is interesting. One would think that aesthetics would play little to no part in selecting for race horses. But we have compelling evidence that the change in culture has lead to a corruption of this “improvement” goal and the goal to produce faster horses.
Given the extensive money, time, interest, and expertise going into this activity, if they are consistently failing at their stated goals we are remiss if we don’t ask why.
Conformation shouldn’t play a logical role, but we have testimony that it does. So why? And what’s the result?
but is the testimony accurate? Or is it a case that the law of dimishing returns is at play? If a horse can’t be bred to be faster due to physical and structural constraints (the same way birds cannot develop size similar to the largest pterosaurs and remain volant). It may be similar to asking why chickens the size of ostriches aren’t bred. The fact that QH and SB are still “improving” may mean simply that either the technology applicable to their type of race is being applied or that in fact the breeding of these horses was not as strict as that of the TB. What I find interesting is that the QH & SB both allow “appendix’ or outside blood to be utilzied (both have, as you note, TB blood) but the TB does NOT. It’s every bit as closed a registry as dog breeds. what I would find fascinating is if one could come up with say, an Arab/QH/TB combo that could outrun something like Secretariat. Yet you don’t see it. You do see Arab horses in Endurance races (they just covered the 100 mile endurance horse race in Bahrain) and the QH has the edge as a sprinter, but you just don’t see any serious competition to the TB races.
The testimony doesn’t read as mere speculation to me. In fact it’s a well formed argument as it explains how the culture has changed to one of selling young horses versus home-growing a horse, and how these sales are influenced by aesthetics versus performance — which is true of almost all such sales like this where an animal is trotted into a ring and an auction takes place where there’s little or no knowledge of what that animal has done outside that ring, it’s just like a dog show except you have an auction instead of a judge.
It’s an observation that answers all the questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how. So it’s not just a “what if” bit of speculation like “what if the Thoroughbred has reached its limit.” That speculation is answered by the significant improvement made by the other related horse breeds over the same time. The failure to break records does not show lack of advancement, it’s worse, it’s evidence for a move in the other direction.
And even if we put serious weight on the “peaked” argument, that has implications that are not easy to swallow. We’d have to then agree that this sport is actually a sham and that all the time, money, effort, and truck loads of dead horses is going into a mere shadow of the glory of the past and that all the high minded talk of improvement and athleticism and all that is just hype. We’ve moved off Broadway into dinner theatre in Sheboygan.
In fact, the notion of “peaking” necessarily becomes declining when you factor in all the other benefits we’ve developed in the last century regarding health care, nutrition, medical understanding, the human element, and equipment improvements.
And what’s the answer if you want to maintain the improvement ideal but find yourself plateaued by genetics? Well, an out-cross of course. And that speaks against the Thoroughbred culture as well.
by the way, thought you’d enjoy this:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/19/sport/secretariat-preakness-record/index.html?hpt=us_c2
As for sales when the animal is simply viewed — from what I’ve seen of the auctions, they also provide the pedigree. This is pretty much identical to cattle sales and sheep sales when one is dealing with juvenile animals. When I buy a ram lamb, I can’t buy it on it’s own record. I buy it on what I know about it’s parents and “how it looks”. I can’t agree that the Tb auctions are significantly different. I do agree that the “race young and retire” for the top stallions tends to drive animals that are not, in general, sturdy.
And an outcross would be interesting. Currently the races like the Preakness, etc, are closed to anything but a TB, but there are of course, “match races”. I think if one DID have a Arab/TB/? cross that was faster than Secretariat, it would be perfectly possible to go public and challenge the TB world. I believe the closed venue is pretty much intended to keep the stallion fees up and the prices up. Nor do I think that anyone is “cheating”. It may be that in the past, a horse was regularly doped. To get the same performance with the modern requirements for vetting and bans on drugs, might well require some very challenging combinations in the genetics realm — and the requirement for live breeding precludes using splicing or AI so one is pretty much limited to “what is available”.
I’m not going to get into the “truckloads of dead horses” issue other than to note that on Nat Geo’s “Wild America” they note that an 11 year old wild mustang is a very old horse. If humans aren’t keeping the animals, then the default is their “average lifespan in the wild”. I believe in treating animals with dignity and respect and avoiding meaningless pain or suffering, but I don’t see that treating horses as livestock is evil.
There are problems in the racing (and in jumping & cross country as well), but I don’t think they are based on conformation breeding.
I did enjoy reading that, thanks.
I’m actually pretty amazed that they would revisit the issue after so much time and actually make it harder for today’s horses to beat that record, especially because so few records fall. They actually took a tie-record off the books by doing so.
Secretariat is actually a very interesting case genetically given that he had the enlarged heart (but apparently not in a congestive heart failure sort of way) but he could not pass this on to his sons. Very interesting evidence toward an X-linked characteristic, which is again an example of how breeders so often fail to appreciate how vital females are to a breed’s health and performance.
When you consider that mitochondria are the key to ALL energy in the body and metabolism and that what seems to be Secretariat’s most compelling advantage were actually both gifts from his mother, not his father.
Yes that is correct, Secretariat’s large heart gene is X linked according to the research I read so it could NOT be passed on to his sons. Any foal getting an X gene from the father is going to be female as the mother can only give X genes.
However his male grand foals through ALL of his daughters would have a 50% chance of getting the large heart gene since all of his daughters would inherit it. It is my understanding that Secretariat is recognized as a sire of desirable brood mares. When you start looking into attitudes that Thoroughbred breeders have – most of the experienced ones pay attention to mare lines as well as stallion lines.
Secretariat’s first foal was a male out of an Appaloosa mare who became a registered Appaloosa and was named “First Secretary”.
He was used in breeding Appaloosa race horses but since he was a male the large heart gene did not get passed into the Appaloosa gene pool. First Secretary himself was never raced.
They did figure out that Secretariat’s daughters were of more value than his sons, but of course this was before DNA gene identification. Bodemeister’s ties to Secretariat are through daughters. It’s easier in the TB world to use a gene transmitted by the stud than one transmitted on the X gene. Apparently Sham also had a larger than average heart but not as large as Secretariat.
Some of the Jocky club stats (see http://www.jockeyclub.com/factbook.asp ) are pretty interesting.
Having spent 13 years working as a TA teachinn Veterinary Anatomy and having had as my research topic high speed locomotion in mammals I have some thoughts on the failure of Thoroughbred records to continue to fall. One of these is that there is a maximum set of mechanical attributes available in a mammalian bone-ligament-muscle locomotory system and I think Thoroughbreds are running at speeds that are at that maximum. Weight and speed are the major contributors to these limitations.
Damage to structural elements under shear stress is at a much lower force than under direct loading. This means a column will fail when it is taking support at an angle rather than as a direct downward load. Most of the tragedies seen during races to top performing horses are of the nature of skeletal fractures that suggest to me failure under shear.
One experiment done on fresh cadaver bone from cattle showed that the bone would fail under compression at 30,000 lbs per in sq while it would fail under shear at 18,000 lbs per inch square. When you run the weight of the average Thoroughbred, the forces created when running full speed and the tiny cross section of the cannon bones and bones of the pastern in horses through a theoretical calculation of forces experienced during the fastest gallops, you come up with forces close to those generated in the experiment.
Thoroughbreds gallop – a gait in which each limb independently supports the horse while Standardbreds trot and Pace – gaits in which pairs of limbs support the horse. Thus halving the load on any one limb. In addition the trotting/pacing Standardbreds travel at a slower pace than the galloping Thoroughbreds. I would expect their performance speeds to improve for a while up to the limit enforced by the fact that trotting and pacing are intrinsically slower gaits due to their two limb support nature.
This most certainly explains why we see the injuries we do. I don’t think it explains why there has been little improvement. If we hold the anatomy constant, we should still see a shift in performance due to the many other factors improving over 40 years.
As it is, it doesn’t even appear that we are actively testing that ceiling. While I’d love to see what the mass of race time data shows, where it’s moving and such (sort of like those great visualization lectures we see on TED), I suspect that the bell curve of performance has shifted away from the ceiling because the outliers on the fast side are not beating the old records.
I recall reading somewhere that Secretariat’s dam Somethingroyal was being teased by a Trakehner stud that broke loose and actually bred her. Bold Ruler was brought in and bred to her right after in hopes of him actually siring the foal.
I don’t know how true any of this is, and it’s likely just rumor. The same story went on to say Bold Ruler never produced another chestnut colt, which is patently wrong, as a good number of his foals were actually chestnut.
If the latter half of a story is a lie, it casts doubts on the former half. Even still, I like to secretly think that Secretariat was sired by that Trakehner, which gave him a hybrid vigor, and boosted that with that X chromosome super heart, even if it’s only true in my mind.
I love horses as much as I love dogs. They run neck and neck in my first and second loves, and I can’t think of which I love more, though I will be honest and say that in part the horse love is fueled by fictional fantasies promoted by Walter Farley and Margaret Henry.
The Thoroughbred IS in danger, much for the same reason so many dog breeds are in danger. First and foremost is the closed gene pool. The second, popular sire bottlenecks.
The third reason is a combination of the two combined with TB racing culture.
These horses are in and line bred on popular sires from very few bloodlines, many of which had leg and foot problems and passed that on to their progeny. This is on top of over working babies and them breaking down from too much strain and stress on bones too immature to handle it.
The average TB seems to have an effective working life of 3 years. They start at 2, and retire at 4, and this is being generous. Zynyatta racing 4 years and never breaking down is NOT the norm, and it should be. For her to be a mare and do that is unheard of.
Every triple crown season they talk about how many thousands of foals are born, and how those foals all come down to these few colts that have made it to the Derby. They don’t tell people about what happened to all those foals that don’t make it as racers, and very few of them make it into the sporthorse world.
Secretariat’s baby daddy was not a Trakehner — the resulting offspring of a Trak X TB cross makes for an excellent sporthorse, especially for eventing as the Trakehner is one of the warmblood breeds with a lot of hot blood in them, but they are not going to run as fast as a TB. In fact, any cross with a TB is going to lose speed at the mile to mile and one half distance. You can get crosses that go faster than pure TB at the sprints — almost all of the race bred QHs are this, some have been full TB — and I’d wager that you could get “faster” endurance racers from a TB cross than a full TB — this is undoubtedly true, as Arabs dominate endurance racing and TB staying lines are dropping out of the studbook like flies for the past 30+ years — and you can certainly get better jumpers, eventers, carriage, dressage horses (and even some cowhorses) with a cross, as TBs have lost much of their old versatility (and other breeds have been selectively bred for these functions), but you will not get anything faster over the classic TB race distances (that’s why the TB boys are not willing to bring in new blood — believe me, some breeders/trainers have admitted that inbreeding and a closed studbook is doing no favors for their horses, but market forces would make it impossible to open it up, besides overall lack of acceptance of such a non-kosher idea).
A lot of it has to do with the fact that TBs are pretty much mechanically maxed out — I think we’re seeing in them the end of the line as far as how fast the equine anatomy can go and not break down. What is interesting is that we may be selecting for speed but not stamina — the old, staying lines of TBs have largely been ignored in order to get precocious, early speed, and many of the speed horses do not have sturdy conformations (conformation does play a role with horses, but the usual considerations are of a utilitarian nature; a horse with weak leg structure or bad balance does not hold up to work, of course this applies only to race/sport horses, who are not so uptight about conformation as it would appear — Bold Ruler was a very popular sire, but he was notorious as far as his poor leg structure, which he did have a tendency to pass to his offspring, the halter and pleasure horse industries are a whole other can of worms…if anything the TB people have been unwise in their quest for early speed at the expense of structural sturdiness and bottlenecking their breed even further). And that raises the criticisms of being so hell bent on selecting for a couple of particular traits that you destroy what little genetic diversity there is in a breed. TBs are like dogs in that regard: the original gene pool wasn’t very big, and there have not been any infusions of fresh blood for a very long time — from my own experience though I have found that this has caused more hardiness and long term mental/physical soundness issues, plus a growing lack of versatility (TBs used to be one of the ultimate sporthorses who regularly were placed on Olympic squads — no longer) than declining speed index).
Probably the closest dog parallel would be the racing greyhounds — what are their race times like compared to 50 years ago? (I say 50 rather than 100 to compensate for the difference in reproductive rate between TBs and Greyhounds).
Thoroughbred times are not improving in North America, but they are improving in Europe. Some ages ago, I read that Mahmoud’s Derby record time in the 1930s would probably never be lowered because it was set in a drought year, and Epsom is now watered.
Except that the Derby record time was improved upon, and continues to be improved upon in recent years. Since the bloodlines in Europe are much the same as in the US, and if anything, are even more inbred AND the drug policies are different, I think these data points indicate that training and raceday drug usage are making major differences.
The time for the Arc de Triomphe continues to improve into the present day. It is contested by international fields that tend to be the best in the world, more competitive than the Breeders Cup Classic fields.
Does anyone else remember when NYRA tracks still ran races without raceday ‘medication’? Most years, when the Kentucky Derby winner and Preakness winner would come to NY for the Belmont, there would be a change in form, something that stopped after 1995 when the drug rules changed.
TBs are hardly trained in this country any longer. It isn’t because they are more fragile, because the same bloodlines run in Gr 1 races in Australia more than twice a month AND they run farther. If you do not train a horse to be able to cope with hard exercise, bad things are going to happen, and they do. (By the way, the record for the 2 mile Melbourne Cup still belongs to a son of Secretariat.)
Any horse may be made fragile by lack of exercise.
Secretariat was a son of Bold Ruler. Bold Ruler looked nothing like his famous son, but he sired two other good chestnut sons out of Princequillo mares: Bold Lad (USA) out of Misty Morn and Blade, out of Monarchy, a sister to Round Table. Bold Lad, like Secretariat, was a champion at 2 and a Kentucky Derby favorite (he suffered a bowed tendon). Something about Bold Ruler + Princequillo could produce gaudy chestnuts.
Europe uses the same lines as NA — there isn’t that much difference between the two.
Could time improvements be due to improvements in Europe’s turf tracks? (running on turf has been shown to have less of a rate of catastrophic breakdown, but the older turf tracks could get notoriously heavy — which turns in slower times)
There have been studies done to try and determine what is the proper amount of work load for young racehorses — so far from what I’ve read they had discovered that the European system wasn’t better, as many of the European horses at the time had less bone density than NA ones as three yos., but the NA system of running horses more could lead to soft tissue injuries that could eventually lead to breakdowns later in life. This was irregardless of doping (and everybody dopes racehorses — not saying it’s right or wrong but when it comes to doping no one group is clean — some of the anti-doping measures have also been enacted in order for the meat industry to have better, quicker access to horses).
I know this is an old article, but I should mention that there’s another glaring problem with the TB racing industry: the over-emphasis of the stud. I think it’s summed up best by the words of a guide that took a me on a tour of the Lexington breeding farms who, after waving off a stable as ‘you don’t want to see them, they’re only broodmares’ said: “If you’re ever offered the chance to own a racehorse and you have the choice between a colt and a filly, always pick the filly. If the colt doesn’t run well he’s gone, if the filly doesn’t run well you can still breed her.”
When talking about the genetic lines of a horse the focus is near exclusively on the male. You talk extensively about the stud’s career and his fathers before him, and the mare (if brought up at all) is an afterthought put in to be able to talk about her male lineage. It’s hard to do anything else, mare racing careers usually have little expectation beyond killing time before she can head to the breeding shed.
Despite the multitude of mares and fillies on the track, many of them incredibly talented, the limited individuals of note are known for either successful foal production after unsuccessful or non-existent careers or their capability to run against males rather a lucrative career running among their like-gendered peers which would be brought up ad nauseam in a stud. And, even when talking about those successful mares it’s expected you spend a good chunk of time mentioning their male ancestry.
A male who doesn’t run well is rapidly castrated, and if that doesn’t help he’s sold off to free up a stall. A female who’s injured or just plain awful at running will be kept for breeding because… she has a functioning uterus? That’s the only real explanation for keeping so many mares who failed at the very sport they were bred for, and farms that (to great acclaim) keep broodmares who have never been so much as saddle broken, to produce the next performance-focused generation.
It just amazes me that, in an industry where the ability to name drop is nearly as important as actually producing results, a full half of those names would simply be shrugged off time and again.
The overemphasis of the stud is both correct and incorrect. Experienced breeders are very careful and knowledgeable about mare line (hence the term “blue hen”). this is the same no matter if in the racing industry or the draft horse breeders — the experienced breeders do pay attention to the mares in a very big way.
But the dynamics of horse breeding will necessitate that the stud is the one advertised — and if a very popular stud will draw in more mares. Reproduction makes it thus, and marketing makes it so. There have been initiatives put into place to reduce the number of mares one stud covers in a season, but you do get into the dicey problem of just whose females get bred by him then? After all, if he’s really good, then everyone wants to breed to him, how do you decide (and specifically how do you find out what mares he’ll cross best with under those circumstances)?
As for the tour of the stud farm — that’s for tourists, so not a good example of what’s going on at a breeding farm.