It’s All About the Data: How Digital Tools Factor into a Trainer’s Work

Article by Jennifer Kelly

The tools for training horses have changed in the last two decades. This new technological era has compelled the centuries-old practices of preparing equine athletes to move with the times, especially with new regulations adding another dimension to the job. Stopwatches and notebooks now have digital counterparts in smartphones and tablets, allowing trainers with multiple barns to stay on top of their operations even if they are thousands of miles away. 

With a variety of tools available now, what are trainers using as they develop their horses while also meeting the requirements of external agencies? How do they handle the influx of information and make it work for their operations? In this new age, trainers are defining their workflows with the tools that work best for them while wrestling with the added costs of the self-education necessary to incorporate these new technologies and meet the increased regulations of the Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA). 

Options Abound

The digital age brings high-tech options like smartphones and tablets that free users from their desks. Such tools may have a learning curve but that has not stopped multiple conditioners from integrating them into their routines. “I never thought in a million years that I would see Hall of Fame trainers sitting on their horse texting or that I would see [them] recording videos of their horses working” Ron Moquett, trainer of champion sprinter Whitmore, observed. 

Now, trainers have many digital options for managing their horses and their employees. A search for apps and software yields tools like Tlore, a web-based management service developed by former exercise rider and assistant trainer Tracy Attfield, and apps like Sleip and Equimetre, which collect data for assessing a horse’s performance. 

Attfield’s Tlore, which is accessible on a smartphone or a desktop computer, serves as a one-stop shop for everything from accounting to tracking a horse’s workouts and daily care. “We do everything through Tlore. I've been on Tlore for a long time,” shared Jena Antonucci, trainer of 2023 Belmont Stakes winner Arcangelo. “[It] organizes everything: herd health, Coggins (an equine blood test), communication with owners, [and] can upload videos, pictures, and updates that owners have access to. So centralizing data, if you wanted to take a picture of a horse when it comes in, see how it's doing, take a 30-day follow-up or whatever, and be able to assess how they are and whatnot. It's all in one spot, easily accessible by smartphone or desktop.” 

Tools like the Equimetre, developed by the French company Arioneo, collect physical performance measurements, and improve on earlier iterations of the technology, allowing users to select what data they want rather than offering multiple readings that trainers have to sort through to find what they need. Both Tom Amoss and Tom Morley are currently testing this tool in their barns to see if the data generated is a benefit to their programs. “[We’re] trying to decide whether or not that system is going to benefit us,” Amoss shared. “The old system, compared to that, is literally using a stopwatch and observing with your eyes how the horse is going. So this gives us a little bit more accurate reading in terms of times, specifically when horses work out, which is about once a week for us.”

Alongside the Equimetre is Sleip, a Swedish app that uses artificial intelligence to analyze a horse’s gait and help trainers to pick up on even the slightest variation to get ahead of potential issues. Casse has been using the app for two years as another layer of care, videoing his horses daily as part of his care regimen. “When I was introduced to Sleip, I liked it because I felt like every assistant could have one. And it takes about a minute if you know what you're doing to video it. We get the results back in less than five minutes, and I can know it can be done in Toronto, and I can have the results in my hand in Ocala within minutes.” 

In addition to Attfield’s Tlore, trainers like Moquett, Casse, Morley, and John Shirreffs are using readily available services and apps to maintain the data generated by their horses. Moquett and Casse both report using spreadsheets created on either Numbers, an iPhone app, or Microsoft Excel, the nearly forty-year-old software available for use on everything from a smartphone to a desktop. 

“Feed charts, the shoeing charts, the day-to-day set lists are all done on an Excel program. It means that I can be sat in Ocala, and I can put a set list together and just email it off to each division, and then they know what they're doing.” Morley reported, emphasizing the flexibility and simplicity of that software, something that Casse echoed in talking about his process. 

“I did use Tlore for a while, but now we have our own deal. It's an Excel sheet that I developed over 25 years ago. I can go back and tell you, since a horse arrived, whether it was five years ago or four years ago, what the horse has done every day for those four years,” Casse shared. “We keep track of entries there, who we are going to enter, where we're going to run, where they're located through the morning. As every track is done, our assistants then send us [their information]. It tells how every horse trained that day. If it worked, there'll be the workout time, and then they put what they would like to do tomorrow, and I will then review them all. I review it every day.”

Moquett uses a custom chart that he maintains in the Numbers app for keeping up with his horses’ preparations and care and then Tlore for the financial side of his business. The iPhone app serves as the ideal tool for his barn because “you go in there and you make your own log sheets and then it saves it and shares it with whoever you want to,” he shared. “So, we use that as data keeping, [maintaining] our training charts, our workout deals, our notes. All that is there. And it's pretty cool because on that we have the people in charge of shipping, the people in charge of billing, the people in charge of payroll, and the people in charge of everything use that to get the information to feed Tlore.” 

California-based Shirreffs uses several apps to cover everything from taking notes about daily training to scanning his vet book to logging his employees’ hours. The GoodNotes app, available for Apple products, serves as his training log and a repository for notes and other information. He also uses a journaling app called Day One to keep up with day-to-day conditions and Numbers for maintaining charts. All of his tools are linked and the data saved to the iCloud service. “Then if I'm somewhere, I can just look things up on my iPhone because it goes from device to device, [and then] it all goes to the cloud,” the Derby-winning trainer said. 

Morley and Amoss also use handicapping tools like the Daily Racing Form’s Formulator, Ragozin sheets, and Ed Tucker’s ThoroManager to help them evaluate potential competition as well as horses that they are interested in claiming or purchasing. Such programs allow users to access detailed past performances, take notes about a potential claim’s performances and evaluate pedigree information, including how well a horse’s family ran at a particular distance or on a specific surface or racetrack. 

With all of this data available to these trainers from their chosen tools, is it possible to have too much data? Each has developed systems that work for their operations, which allows them to cut out unnecessary information and focus on what is most useful. Arioneo’s Equimetre and Attfield’s Tlore are ready-made products specifically geared toward the equine industry with not only multiple options for use, but also adaptability that prevents data overload. Apps and software like Numbers, Excel, and other readily available tools allow even more flexibility, giving conditioners the ability to streamline their processes and focus on the most valuable information for their horses’ development and care.

“If you try ten new things, and only one of them is worth it, it's worth the nine failures. In the past, I have used a few different things that I thought just was too much and too time consuming,” Casse said. “We only have so much time, and you always have to decide, do the assets outweigh the liabilities? Do I get enough out of this to take my time up? And if the answer is not yes, then I move on. And I have used other things, and I've moved on.”

As digital tools evolve and their usability is more easily tailored to each trainer’s needs, they become essential parts of the daily workflow, especially now that HISA requires conditioners to register themselves, their employees, and their horses, and maintain records of treatments, medical procedures, and more. 

Hello, HISA

Since July 2022, the Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Authority has required trainers to maintain records about their horses in an online portal. For some, adding the portal to their lists of tasks was another use for the data they were already collecting. “We already had it, so now we're giving it to them,” Moquett shared. “So, it was a priority for us to make sure we were staying legal, to write down what we were doing, and now it's priority to keep it, to make sure we're staying compliant with the rules that they have set.”

What digital tools like Tlore do goes beyond bookkeeping and the care and feeding of horses: they help trainers track the data HISA requires documented. “You just have to play by the rules and input what you're supposed to be inputting and keep track of your horse's medical records,” Antonucci shared. “If it gets ace (acepromazine), it goes in. Like checking joints, it gets put in. So that's just very basic. Whatever the veterinarian does, anytime they touch a horse at a racetrack gets put in.” 

“Every little thing we do now, we record. Definitely, that's what HISA was there for,” Casse said. “HISA is saying, look, we need to let everybody know when a horse changes hands, what's been done previously, and that's important. It's a pain, but in the end, it's going to save horses’ lives, and that's what we're all trying to achieve.”

The portal gives claiming trainers data they did not previously have. “Now, if you claim a horse, you are privy to their medical records for the past 60 days,” Morley shared. “So, you can not only see when they were vaccinated and wormed, et cetera, et cetera, but also if they've had intra-articular injections, if they've had a period of colic or sickness, et cetera, over the last 60 days.” This enables trainers to understand what the previous barn had been doing with the horse as they integrate the new trainee into their program. 

Even though the portal does add another task to trainers’ to-do lists, it does have value, as Morley pointed out: “That's actually a very good portal for keeping track of records. So rather than us having to flick back through our veterinary records as to when they were last vaccinated, et cetera, it's all logged in HISA anyway.” 

Still, while this new requirement does have its upsides, the portal and the work needed to maintain the required data has become yet another task on a trainer’s long to-do list.

More Data, More Work

But this kind of digital diligence has its disadvantages. In addition to keeping up with their horses’ day-to-day management, both on the track and off, trainers must document all medical and therapeutic treatments and log that data into HISA’s portal in order to stay compliant. This is especially important for horses coming off a long layup at an off-site facility. Tools like Tlore and other digital workflows might help conditioners maintain this needed information, but those tasks also use two valuable resources: time and money. 

For Amoss, the added layer of HISA meant adding another full-time employee to his operation, one in charge of keeping up with the required information to adhere to these new regulations. “The biggest thing with HISA is that the requirements that we have are not only costly to the trainer to manage it, but it's costly to the owner in terms of the things that we have to do. In a world where the day rate, which is what an owner pays a trainer every day to train their horse, the margins for almost all of us are very razor thin. And now we've got to add a new dimension to that,” Amoss observed. 

John Shirreffs points out the simplicity of the training process prior to HISA and its requirements. “I think that we all feel like we're being second-guessed, though. We have to substantiate our decision. Before these new tools, I didn't have to keep up with anything. All I had to do was mark the trainer card, and that would be written in the vet book, and that was it. I didn't really need to have all this.” 

“I think they all detract from the ability to train because I think it takes time. And that's taking time to enter all this stuff where I could be walking down the shed row and observing a horse or talking to a groom about a horse or something like that,” he shared. “Because I need to keep records, it takes away from the time available, because, by 11:00, you want to wrap things up, so the horses have a chance to rest. You don't want to be standing in front of the stall staring at them when they want to take a nap.”

Amoss, who worked for Jack Van Berg and Frank Brothers before going out on his own, remembered that “they did all their bookwork and all their recording by hand. There is an advantage to that, in my opinion. And the advantage is that you can, on a daily basis, open that book and review your horse.” The Kentucky Oaks-winning trainer prefers that because “it tends to refresh my thinking on those horses as opposed to turning on my iPad.” 

The key for any trainer as they focus on developing their horses is to find workflows that balance the necessities of HISA with the methods that have brought each success. In this transitional moment, these digital tools afford conditioners opportunities to find what works for them as they adapt to these new requirements. 

Going Forward

Tools like Equimetre and Sleip are on the cutting edge of digital tools available now, using artificial intelligence and other advances to help trainers keep an eye on their horses’ physical conditions and detect any subtle changes that might evolve into an issue. Along with HISA’s regulations, these provide another layer of preventative care for the animals at the heart of the sport. These advances push racing forward and necessitate adapting to the times, taking old-school practices into the digital age.

“Here's the thing with old school. I am old school in my mindset of horsemanship, and I'm old school as an approach to getting the horse trained,” Moquett observed. “But saying that I'm old school as an excuse not to get with the times of what's needed for this kind of stuff, it's like saying, no, we’re going to haul our horses on a train instead of flying them. We have to [adapt]. That's what's required.” 

Along with these tools, Casse suggests another advancement that could help trainers: “I'm hoping that somewhere in the future that we'll have some type of report card that goes with every horse, a passport that tells everything about any type of treatment that the horse has had through his, whether it's corrective surgery, any type of operation, or anything.”

“We're still not quite there yet, but that would be something that I hope that our industry can start doing a little better. We need to understand there's a lot of things that go on, and we need to have more data to see how meaningful it is,” the Hall of Famer concluded. 

As this historic sport continues to adapt, as the available apps and software expands, the focus remains on finding the right tools to collect and utilize the information trainers need as they balance their official duties with their focus on developing their horses for the racetrack and beyond.

Artificial Intelligence tools - and their growing use in selecting yearlings

Book 1 of the Tattersalls October Yearling Sale is traditionally where some of the finest horseflesh in the world is bought and sold. The 2022 record-busting auction saw 424 lots pass through its hallowed rotunda for a total of 126,671,000 guineas. One of the jewels in the crown was undoubtedly lot 379, a Frankel colt out of Blue Waltz, who was knocked down to Coolmore's M.V. Magnier, joined by Peter Brant, for 1,900,000 guineas.

 It is easy to see why lot 379 made Coolmore open its purse strings. He has a stallion’s pedigree, being out of a Pivotal mare. His sire has enjoyed a banner year on the track, with eight individual Gp/Gr1 winners in 2022. He is a full brother to the winning Blue Boat, himself a 450,000 guineas purchase for Juddmonte Farms at Book 1 in 2020. Lot 379 is undeniably impressive on the page. 

But it is not his impeccable pedigree that makes Tom Wilson believe lot 379 has the makings of a future champion. “The machine doesn’t have any biases. It doesn’t know whether it’s a Galileo or a Dubawi or a Havana Grey,” he says. “The machine just looks at the movement of the horse and scores it as it sees it. It has no preconceptions about who the elite sires in the market are. It’s completely neutral.”

The “machine” to which Wilson is referring is, in reality, a complex computational model that he claims can predict with 73 percent accuracy whether a horse will be elite (which he defines as an official rating of 90 or above, or the equivalent in its own jurisdiction) or non-elite (horses rated 60 or below) based on its walk alone. It’s a bold claim. So how does he do it?

First, Wilson taught an open source artificial intelligence tool, DeepLabCut, to track the movements of the horse at the walk. To do this, he fed it thousands of hours of footage. He then extracted around 100 frames from each video and manually labeled the body parts. “You teach it what a hock is, what a fetlock is, what a hip is,” he explains. “Eventually, when you feed new videos through, it automatically recognises them and plots the points. Then you can map the trajectories and the angles.”

He then feeds this information into a separate video classification algorithm that analyzes the video and compares it to historic data in order to generate a predicted rating for the horse. “Since 2018, I’ve taken about 5,000 videos of yearlings from sales all around the world with the same kind of biometric markers placed on them and then gone through the results and mapped what performance rating each yearling got,” he says. “So we’re marrying together the video input from the sale to the actual results achieved on track.”

Lot 379 has a projected official rating of 107 based on his biomechanics alone, the highest of all the Frankel’s on offer in Book 1 (yes, even higher than the 2,800,000 gns colt purchased by Godolphin). Wilson’s findings have been greeted with skepticism in some quarters. “There’s so many other factors that you can’t measure,” points out trainer Daniel Kübler. “There’s no way an external video can understand the internal organs of a horse, which you can find through vetting. If it’s had an issue with its lungs, for example, it doesn’t matter how good it looks. If it’s inefficient at getting oxygen into its system, it’s not going to be a good racehorse.”

“It’s not a silver bullet,” concedes Wilson. “There are multiple ways to find good horses. It’s just another metric, or set of metrics, that helps.” But is it really “just another metric,” or the opening salvo in a data revolution that has the potential to transform the way racehorses are bought and sold?

Big data. Analytics. Moneyball. It goes by many names, but the use of data in sports is, of course, nothing new. It was brought to popular attention by Michael Lewis in his 2003 book Moneyball and by the 2011 film of the same name starring Brad Pitt. 

It charted the fortunes of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. You know the story: Because of their smaller budget compared to rivals such as the New York Yankees, Oakland had to find players who were undervalued by the market. To do this, they applied an analytical, evidence-based approach called sabermetrics. The term ‘sabermetrics’ was coined by legendary baseball statistician Bill James. It refers to the statistical analysis of baseball records to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players. Sabermetrics has subsequently been adopted by a slew of other Major League Baseball teams (in fact, you would be hard pressed to find an MLB team that doesn’t employ a full-time sabermetrics analyst), and ‘moneyball’ has well and truly entered the sporting lexicon on both sides of the Atlantic.

Take Brentford FC. As recently as 2014, the West London club was languishing in the third tier of English football. Today, Brentford is enjoying its second consecutive season in the top flight (Premier League), bucking the trend of teams that gain promotion only to slingshot back down to the lower leagues after one season. 

What is their secret? Moneyball. Brentford’s backroom staff has access to vast streams of data that detail how their players rank across a number of key metrics. This information helps them make day-to-day training ground decisions. But crucially, it also shapes their activity in the transfer market by helping them to identify undervalued players to sell on for a profit. Players such as Ezri Konsa, purchased from Charlton for a rumored £2.5 million in 2018 before being sold, one year later, to Aston Villa for a £10 million profit. Think of it as the footballing equivalent of pinhooking. 

The bottom line is that data analysis has already transformed the way athletes are recruited and trained across a range of sports. It stands to reason, therefore, that statistical modeling could help buyers who are spending, on average, 298,752 guineas for a yearling at Book 1 make informed purchasing decisions.

“I’ve always been interested in applying data and technology to an industry that doesn’t exactly embrace technology.” That’s according to star bloodstock agent Bryon Rogers. Rogers is widely regarded as the godfather of the biometrics movement in racing. “The thoroughbred industry is one that moves slowly, rather than quickly,” he adds, with a dash of irony. 

Having cut his teeth at Arrowfield Stud in his native Australia and Taylor Made Farm in Kentucky, in 2011 he started his own company, Performance Genetics. As its name implies, the company initially focused on DNA sequencing, attempting to identify markers that differentiated elite and non-elite horses.

From there, it branched out into cardiovascular and biomechanical research. Rogers quickly discovered that it was the biomechanical factors that were the most influential in terms of identifying future elite horses. “When you put all the variables in, the ones that surface to the top as the most important are actually the biomechanical features: the way the horse moves and the way the horse is constructed. They outweigh DNA markers and cardiovascular measurements,” he explains. 

According to Rogers, roughly a fifth (19.5 percent, to be exact) of what makes a horse a horse is explained by the way it moves. “That’s not to say that [those other factors] are not important. It’s just that if you’re ranking them by importance, the biomechanical features are more important than the cardiovascular ones.” 

His flag bearer is Malavath. Purchased at the 2020 Goffs Premier Yearling Sale for £29,000, she was first sold for €139,200 at the Arqana Breeze Up Sale the following year. “I know when I’ve found one,” recounts Rogers. “I walked up to her [at the sale], and there was nobody else there. At that time, [her sire] Mehmas wasn’t who he was. But her scores, for us, were an A plus. She shared a lot of the common things with the good sprinter-milers that we’ve got in the database. A lot of the dimensions were very similar, so she fit into that profile.” She has since proven herself as a Gp2 winner and most recently finished second behind Kinross in the Prix de La Forêt on Arc day.

In December 2022, Malavath sold again, but this time for €3.2m to Moyglare Stud and is set to continue her racing career in North America under the tutelage of Christophe Clement.

A find like Malavath has only been made possible through the rapid development of deep learning and artificial intelligence in recent years. Rogers’s own models build on technology originally developed for driverless cars—essentially, how a car uses complex visual sensors and deep learning to figure out what’s happening around it in order to make a decision about what to do next.

But wait. What is deep learning? Here comes the science bit! Machine learning and deep learning are both types of artificial intelligence. “Classical” machine learning is A.I. that can automatically adapt with minimal human interference. Deep learning is a form of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to mimic the learning process of the human brain by recognising patterns the same way that the human nervous system does, including structures like the retina. 

“My dad’s an eye surgeon in Australia and he was always of the opinion that what will be solved first in artificial intelligence will be anything to do with vision,” says Rogers knowingly. Deep learning is much more computationally complex than traditional machine learning. It is capable of modeling patterns in data as sophisticated, multi-layered networks and, as such, can produce more accurate models than other methods.

Chances are you’ve already encountered a deep neural network. In 2016, Google Translate transitioned from its old, phrase-based statistical machine translation algorithm to a deep neural network. The result was that its output improved dramatically from churning out often comical non-sequiturs to producing sentences that are closely indistinguishable from a professional human translator.

So does this mean that the received wisdom around how yearlings are selected is outdated, subjective and flawed? Not exactly. “There are so many different ways of being a good horse;  I don’t think [selecting horses] will ever completely lose its appeal as an art form,” says Rogers. “But when we get all this data together and we start to look at all these data points, it does push you towards a most predictable horse.” In other words, following the data will not lead you to a diamond in the rough; rather, it’s about playing the percentages. And that’s before all before the horse goes into training.

After that point, the data only gets you so far. “I would say [the use of biomechanical modeling] probably explains somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of outcome,” says Rogers. “It’s very hard to disentangle. The good racehorse trainer has got all the other things working with him: he’s got the good jockeys, the good vet, the good work riders. He’s got all of those things, and their effect on racetrack outcomes is very hard to model and very hard to disaggregate from what we do.”

Nevertheless, it does not look like big data is going away any time soon. “It might be a couple of years away,” says Rogers. “As bloodstock gets more and more expensive and as the cost of raising a horse gets more and more expensive, the use of science is going to rise.” He believes there’s already an analytics arms race happening behind the scenes.

“For me, it isn’t a case of if it’s valuable; it’s a case of when it will be recognised as being valuable.” That’s Wilson again. “What you see in every sport is a big drive towards using statistical analysis and machine learning to qualify and understand performance. Every other sporting sector tells us that these methods will be adopted, and the ones that adopt them first will gain a performance edge over the rest of the field.”

Comparisons to Deep Blue’s defeat of Garry Kasparov might be premature, but it is clear that the racing industry is fast approaching a tipping point. “I don’t think the machine on its own beats the human judge,” says Wilson. “But I think where you get the real benefit is when you use the information you've been given by machine learning and you combine that with deep human expertise. That’s where the application of these types of things are the most successful in any sport. It’s the combination of human and machine that is power. Humans and machines don’t have to compete with each other.”

So will more trainers be adopting the technology? “There’s lots of different data points that you can use to predict a horse’s potential, and it’s understanding all of the pieces together,” says Kübler. “I’d want a bit more proof of concept. Show me that your system is going to save me loads of time and add loads of value. We’ll see in three or four years’ time how good it was.”

In the meantime, all eyes will be on Lot 379.

Does Jockey Gender Make a Difference?

Experts from the University of Nottingham have found that the sex of a jockey doesn’t influence any aspect of racehorse physiology and performance.

Article by Charlotte Schrurs and David S. Gardner

Charlotte Schrurs

The findings of the study, presently published as a preprint at Research Square, offer a new perspective on the possible balance of elite male and female jockeys on the start line of races.

Studies assessing the effect of the sex of a rider on racehorse performance and physiology during training have not been reported, mostly due to the lack of available data for female participants within the sport.

David S. Gardner

The racing of Thoroughbred horses has a tradition dating back to the 18th century in the UK. However, it was not until the mid-late 20th century that the first ladies’ race was held. In the present day, more than 90% of participating jockeys, in most racing nations, are men. This is likely an unconscious bias toward male jockeys being, on average, physically “stronger,” able to push horses harder, and thus performing better in races than female jockeys.

In horse racing, male and female jockeys compete against each other in the majority of races. This is because the competitive advantage is less on the physical attributes of the rider but more on skill level or ability to partner with an animal. Indeed, racing requires quick reaction time and agility from the jockey while being able to navigate the horse with dexterity across the peloton at peak speeds often exceeding 37mph. This decade has seen a marked increase in participation of female jockeys at an elite level in the racing industry. In 2021, the Irish jockey — Rachael Blackmore — made history by winning several high-profile races. This year, she continued her remarkable rise by becoming the first female jockey ever to win the Gold Cup at the Cheltenham Festival.

Success stories like this are shaping global betting behaviors on the racetrack and challenging the public’s confidence in the ability of male or female jockeys to win big races. In the UK and Ireland, previous research had suggested an underestimation of the ability of female jockeys to win races, as recorded in betting behavior.

In racing, a competitive advantage may lie in the ability of a jockey to control the horse, and/or less weight carried by the horse (i.e. weight of jockey plus saddle). Experts from the University of Nottingham have found that the sex of a jockey doesn’t influence any aspect of racehorse physiology and performance.

Researchers from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science at the University of Nottingham (UK) worked with Scientific Director Guillaume Dubois, PhD, at Arioneo Ltd — a company that developed a bespoke exercise tracking device for horses; and an Equine Sports Medicine specialist (Dr. Emmanuelle van Erck-Westergren, PhD; Equine Sports Medicine Practice, Belgium) to answer some of these questions.

They monitored 530 Thoroughbred racehorses, ridden by 103 different work riders, which were randomly allocated to a horse (66 male, 37 female) over a total of 3,568 workouts (varying intensity from slow/med/hard canter to gallop) at a single racing yard (with varying tracks – all weather, dirt and turf ) (Ciaron Maher racing) in Victoria, Australia. Variables such as speed, stride length and frequency, heart rate and rate of recovery were recorded with a validated fitness tracker (the ‘Equimetre©’). This tracker was specifically designed to monitor horses during their daily exercise routine with advanced data analysis services (www.arioneo.com).

An average racehorse weighs ~1,100-1,300lbs, an average jockey, ~108-121lbs. Yet, a few ounces extra on the back of a racehorse has been shown to influence race performance. Therefore, weight carried by the horse (jockey, plus saddle and added weights where necessary) is used to further equalize any perceived performance advantage. This allows horses of varying levels to participate in so called “handicap” races. In such races, each horse is attributed a predetermined weight to carry determined by the racing regulatory board.

Horses with better racing records are allocated higher weights in order to further equalize any perceived performance advantage. Hence, jockeys are weighed in before and weighed out after races.

All being equal, would a racehorse during race-pace workouts perform any differently when ridden by either a female or male jockey? Would that racehorse be more or less likely to win a race?

The research monitored 530 Thoroughbred racehorses, ridden by 103 different work riders, which were randomly allocated to a horse (66 male, 37 female) over a total of 3,568 workouts.

WHAT IT IS COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY?

Computed tomography (CT) helps veterinarians make diagnoses and trainers make decisions. CT scanners take hundreds of x-ray images rotating around the target and create an exact 3D digital rendering. The diagnostic power is in the ability to scroll through the 3D rendering slice by slice, at any angle you choose.

What can it do?

• Small stuff: Tiny P1 fractures and early condylar and coffin fractures: scrolling slices one at a time the tiniest cracks, even bone sclerosis patterns that precede cracks, become clearly visible.

• Hard to see spots: Small bones of the knees and hocks, the suspensory origin, non-displaced cracks in the sesamoids: difficult to evaluate properly on radiographs but clear on CT. CT is also far superior for finding and correcting abnormalities of the skull, teeth and sinuses.

• Cartilage: Arthroscopic surgery has typically been required but by injecting the joint with radio-opaque contrast (sometimes called “dye”) we can see cartilage lesions on CT.

• Fracture prognosis: Two simple condylar fractures may have vastly different outcomes based on trauma unnoticed on plain radiographs. CT enables more accurate prognostication critical for planning the horse’s future.

• The neck: It is shocking how many abnormalities are visible with 3-dimensional imaging of the neck. Nerve compression is visible even when it comes from the side; previously undiagnosable with regular radiographs.

• Surgery: CT guidance enables accurate fracture reconstruction and precise placement of screws in difficult locations.

When to use it?

Think of CT as a microscope; use it when you know where the problem is, but you just can’t see it on radiographs. If you cannot localize the issue, you probably need a bone scan (scintigraphy).

What sets the Mid-Atlantic Equine CT scanner apart?

Image quality and a standing horse.

Two main types of CT: cone beam (x-ray beam is a cone, producing image distortion) and fan beam (beam is a thin blade).

Image detail is far superior with fan beam; the main reason Mid- Atlantic Equine moved to it from the robotic CT. Most fan beam CT units are small and require general anesthesia. The CT scanner at Mid-Atlantic Equine is a Canon large bore CT mounted on a computer controlled platform, allowing true CT imaging in a standing horse (foot to forearm or gaskin, nose to base of the neck C5/6 or 6/7). Under anesthesia imaging of elbows, shoulders, chest, thoracic spine, back, pelvis, SI, hips and stifles can be obtained. Medical care so advanced it almost makes you wish you were a horse. We offer every type of medical care your four-legged athlete could ever need. With board-certified specialists in all fields we provide everything from upper airway, arthroscopic and laparoscopic surgeries, to internal medicine, complex fracture fixation and advanced diagnostic imaging, including bone scans and MRIs — all in one place.

It’s enough to make a human jealous.

Contact:

Tel. 800.724.5358 Address: 40 Frontage Road Ringoes, NJ 08551

Web: www.midatlanticequine.com