A New Look at Lameness

Words - Jackie Zions (interviewing Dr. Koenig)

Prevention is the ideal when it comes to lameness, but practically everyone who has owned horses has dealt with a lay-up due to an unforeseen injury at some point. The following article will provide tools to sharpen your eye for detecting lameness, review prevention tips and discuss the importance of early intervention. It will also begin with a glimpse into current research endeavouring to heal tendon injuries faster, which has obvious horse welfare benefits and supports horse owners eager to return to their training programs. Dr. Judith Koenig of Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) spends half of her time as a surgeon and teacher with a strong interest in equine sports medicine and rehabilitation, and the other half as a researcher at the OVC.

Lameness is a huge focus for Koenig, whose main interest is in tissue healing. “I think over the past 20 or 30 years we have become very, very good in diagnosing the cause of lameness,” says Koenig. “In the past, we had only radiographs and ultrasound as a diagnostic tool, but by now most referral centers also have MRI available; and that allows us to diagnose joint disease or tendon disease even more. We are much better now [at] finding causes that previously may have been missed with ultrasound.” 

Improvements in diagnostics have resulted in increased ability to target treatment plans. With all the different biologics on the market today, Koenig sees a shift in the management of joint disease with more people getting away from steroids as a treatment.

The following list is excerpted from Equine Guelph’s short course on lameness offered on TheHorsePortal.ca. It outlines the different diagnostics available:

Stem Cell Therapy
When asked for the latest news on research she has been involved in, Koenig proclaims, “I'm most excited about the fact that horses are responding well to stem cell treatment—better than I have seen any response to any other drug we have tried so far!”

Koenig has investigated the use of many different modalities to see if they accelerate tissue healing and has studied which cellular pathways are affected. Two recent collaborative studies have produced very exciting findings, revealing future promise for treating equine osteoarthritis with stem cell therapy.  

In a safety study, Koenig and her team at the Ontario Veterinary College have shown equine pooled cryopreserved umbilical cord blood, (eCB) MSC, to be safe and effective in treatment of osteoarthritis.  

“These cells are the ones harvested from umbilical cord blood at the time of foaling and then that blood is taken to the lab and the stem cells are isolated out of it,” explains Koenig. The stem cells are then put through a variety of tests to make sure they are free of infectious diseases. Once given a clean bill of health, they are expanded and frozen. 
The stem cells harvested from multiple donors of equine umbilical cord blood [eCB, (kindly provided by eQcell), MSC] were compared to saline injections in research horses. “This type of cells is much more practical if you have a cell bank,” says Koenig. “You can treat more horses with it, and it’s off the shelf.” There were no systemic reactions in the safety study. Research has also shown no different reactions from sourcing from one donor or multiple donors.  

In the second study, 10 million stem cells per vial were frozen for use in healing OA from fetlock chips in horses that were previously conditioned to be fit. After the fetlock chip was created, exercise commenced for six more weeks, and then osteoarthritis was evaluated by MRI for a baseline. Half the horses were treated with the pooled MSC stem cells, and the control group received saline before another month of exercise. Then MRI and lameness exams were repeated, and arthroscopy was repeated to score the cartilage and remove the chip.

Lameness was decreased and cartilage scores were improved in the group that received stem cell therapy at the time of the second look with arthroscopy.

Many diagnostics were utilized during this study. MRIs, X-rays, ultrasounds and weekly lameness evaluations all revealed signs of osteoarthritis in fetlock joints improved in the group treated with (eCB) MSCs. After six weeks of treatment, the arthroscopic score was significantly lower (better cartilage) in the MSC group compared to the control group. 

“Using the MRI, we can also see a difference that the horses treated with stem cells had less progression of osteoarthritis, which I think is awesome,” says Koenig. “They were less lame when exercised after the stem cell therapy than the horses that received saline.”
This research group also just completed a clinical trial in client-owned horses diagnosed with fetlock injuries with mild to moderate osteoarthritis changes. The horses were given either 10 million or 20 million stem cells and rechecked three weeks and six weeks after the treatment. Upon re-evaluation, the grade of lameness improved in all the horses by at least one. Only two horses presented a mild transient reaction, which dissipated after 48 hours without any need for antibiotics. The horse’s joints looked normal, with any filling in the joint reduced.
There was no difference in the 18 horses, with nine given 10 million stem cells and the other nine 20 million stem cells; so in the next clinical trial, 10 million stem cells will be used.

The research team is very happy with the results of this first-of-its-kind trial, proving that umbilical cord blood stem cells stopped the progression of osteoarthritis and that the cartilage looked better in the horses that received treatment. The future of stem cell therapy is quite promising!

Rehabilitation

Research has shown adhering to a veterinary-prescribed rehabilitation protocol results in a far better outcome than paddock turn out alone. It is beneficial for tendon healing to have a certain amount of controlled stimulation. “These horses have a much better outcome than the horses that are treated with just being turned out in a paddock for half a year,” emphasizes Koenig. “They do much better if they follow an exercise program. Of course, it is important not to overdo it.”

For example, Koenig cautions against skipping hand-walking if it has been advised.  It can be so integral to stimulating healing, as proven in recent clinical trials. “The people that followed the rehab instructions together with the stem cell treatment in our last study—those horses all returned to racing,” said Koenig.  

“It is super important to follow the rehab instructions when it comes to how long to rest and not to start back too early.”

Another concern when rehabilitating an injured horse would be administering any home remedies that you haven't discussed with your veterinarian. Examples included blistering an area that is actively healing or applying  shockwave to mask pain and then commence exercise.

Prevention and Training Tips

While stating there are many methods and opinions when it comes to training horses, Koenig offered a few common subjects backed by research. The first being the importance of daily turnout for young developing horses.  

Turnout and exercise
Many studies have looked at the quality of cartilage in young horses with ample access to turn out versus those without. It has been determined that young horses that lack exercise and are kept in a stall have very poor quality cartilage.
Horses that are started early with light exercise (like trotting short distances and a bit of hill work) and that have access to daily paddock turnout, had much better quality of cartilage. Koenig cited research from Dr. Pieter Brama and similar research groups.

Another study shows that muscle and tendon development depend greatly on low grade exercise in young horses.  Evaluations at 18 months of age found that the group that had paddock turnout and a little bit of exercise such as running up and down hills had better quality cartilage, tendon and muscle.  

Koenig provides a human comparison, with the example of people that recover quicker from injury when they have been active as teenagers and undergone some beneficial conditioning. The inference can be made that horses developing cardiovascular fitness at a young age stand to benefit their whole lives from the early muscle development.

Koenig says it takes six weeks to regain muscle strength after injury, but anywhere from four to six months for bone to develop strength. It needs to be repeatedly loaded, but one should not do anything too crazy! Gradual introduction of exercise is the rule of thumb.

Rest and Recovery

“Ideally they have two rest days a week, but one rest day a week as a minimum,” says Koenig. “I cannot stress enough the importance of periods of rest after strenuous work, and if you notice any type of filling in the joints after workout, you should definitely rest the horse for a couple of days and apply ice to any structures that are filled or tendons or muscles that are hard.” 

Not purporting to be a trainer, Koenig does state that two speed workouts a week would be a maximum to allow for proper recovery. You will also want to make sure they have enough access to salt/electrolytes and water after training.

During a post-Covid interview, Koenig imparted important advice for bringing horses back into work methodically when they have experienced significant time off.

“You need to allow at least a six-week training period for the athletes to be slowly brought back and build up muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness,” says Koenig.  “Both stamina and muscle mass need to be retrained.”

Watch video: “Lameness research - What precautions do you take to start training after time off?”

The importance was stressed to check the horse’s legs for heat and swelling before and after every ride and to always pick out the feet. A good period of walking is required in the warmup and cool down; and riders need to pay attention to soundness in the walk before commencing their work out.

Footing and Cross Training

With a European background, Koenig is no stranger to the varying track surfaces used in their training programs. Statistics suggest fewer injuries with horses that are running on turf, like they practice in the UK.  

Working on hard track surfaces has been known to increase the chance of injury, but delving into footing is beyond the scope of this article.

“Cross training is very important,” says Koenig. “It is critical for the mental and proper musculoskeletal development of the athlete to have for every three training days a day off, or even better provide cross-training like trail riding on these days." 

Cross-training can mitigate overtraining, giving the body and mind a mental break from intense training. It can increase motivation and also musculoskeletal strength. Varied loading from training on different terrain at different gaits means bone and muscle will be loaded differently, therefore reducing repetitive strain that can cause lameness.

Hoof care

Whether it is a horse coming back from injury, or a young horse beginning training, a proficient farrier is indispensable to ensure proper balance when trimming the feet. In fact, balancing the hoof right from the start is paramount because if they have some conformational abnormalities, like abnormal angles, they tend to load one side of their joint or bone more than the other. This predisposes them to potentially losing bone elasticity on the side they load more because the bone will lay down more calcium on that side, trying to make it stronger; but it actually makes the bone plate under the cartilage brittle.  

Koenig could not overstate the importance of excellent hoof care when it comes to joint health and advises strongly to invest in a good blacksmith. Many conformational issues can be averted by having a skilled farrier right from the time they are foals. Of course, it would be remiss not to mention that prevention truly begins with nutrition. “It starts with how the broodmare is fed to prevent development of orthopedic disease,” says Koenig. Consulting with an equine nutritionist certainly plays a role in healthy bone development and keeping horses sound.

Dangers of inbreeding and the necessity to preserve sire lines in the thoroughbred breed

Words - Dr Bernard Stoffel, DVM

Inbreeding is the proportion of the genome identically inherited from both parents.

Inbreeding coefficients can be estimated from pedigrees, but pedigree underestimates the true level of inbreeding. Genomics can measure the true level of inbreeding by examining the extent of homozygosity (identical state) in the DNA of a horse. A mechanism to examine genomic inbreeding for breeding purposes has yet to be developed to be used by all breeders but once available, it must be considered as a tool for breeders.

Breeding of potential champion racehorses is a global multi-billion sterling or dollar business, but there is no systematic industry-mediated genetic population management.

Inbreeding in the modern thoroughbred

The thoroughbred horse has low genetic diversity relative to most other horse breeds, with a small effective population size and a trend of increasing inbreeding.

A trend in increased inbreeding in the global thoroughbred population has been reported during the last five decades, which is unlikely to be halted due to current breeding practices.

Ninety-seven percent of pedigrees of the horses included in a recent study feature the ancestral sire, Northern Dancer (1961); and 35% and 55% of pedigrees in EUR and ANZ contain Sadler’s Wells (1981) and Danehill (1986), respectively.

Inbreeding can expose harmful recessive mutations that are otherwise masked by ‘normal’ versions of the gene. This results in mutational load in populations that may negatively impact on population viability.

Genomics measured inbreeding is negatively associated with racing in Europe and Australia. The science indicates that increasing inbreeding in the population could further reduce viability to race.

In North America, it has been demonstrated that higher inbreeding is associated with lower number of races. In the North American thoroughbred, horses with higher levels of inbreeding are less durable than animals with lower levels of inbreeding. Considering the rising trend of inbreeding in the population, these results indicate that there may also be a parallel trajectory towards breeding less robust animals.

Note that breeding practices that promote inbreeding have not resulted in a population of faster horses. The results of studies, generated for the first time using a large cohort of globally representative genotypes, corroborate this.

Health and disease genes

It is both interesting and worrisome to consider also that many of the performance-limiting genetic diseases in the thoroughbred do not generally negatively impact on suitability for breeding; some diseases, with known heritable components, are successfully managed by surgery (osteochondrosis dessicans, recurrent laryngeal neuropathy, for example), nutritional and exercise management (recurrent exertional rhabdomyolysis), and medication (exercise induced pulmonary hemorrhage). This unfortunately facilitates retention of risk alleles in the population and enhances the potential for rapid proliferation of risk alleles if they are carried by successful stallions.

Types of inbreeding

Not all inbreeding is bad. Breeders have made selections for beneficial genes/traits over the generations, resulting in some inbreeding signals being favored as they likely contain beneficial genes for racing. Importantly, examination of a pedigree cannot determine precisely the extent of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ inbreeding. This can only be determined from DNA analysis.

Historic inbreeding (arising from distant pedigree duplicates) results in short stretches of DNA identically inherited from sire and dam. 

• This may be considered ‘good’ inbreeding.

• It has no negative effect on racing.

• The horse may be carrying beneficial mutations that have been maintained from distant ancestors through breeders’ selection.

Recent inbreeding (arising from close pedigree duplicates) results in long stretches of DNA identically inherited from sire and dam. 

• This may be considered ‘bad’ inbreeding.

• It is negatively associated with racing.

• The horse may be carrying harmful mutations that have not yet been ‘purged’ from the population.

Obviously, in terms of breeding, it’s always possible to find examples and counterexamples of remarkable individuals; but the science of genetics is based on statistics and not on individual cases.

Sire lines

Analysis of the Y chromosome is the best-established way to reconstruct paternal family history in humans and animal species. The paternally inherited Y chromosome displays the population genetic history of males. While modern domestic horses (Equus caballus) exhibit abundant diversity within maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, until recently, only limited Y-chromosomal sequence diversity has been detected.

Early studies in the horse indicated that the nucleotide variability of the modern horse Y chromosome is extremely low, resulting in six haplotypes (HT).4.5 However, this view has changed with the identification of new genetic markers, showing that there is considerably more genetic diversity on the horse Y chromosome than originally thought. Unfortunately, in thoroughbreds, the male gene pool is restricted, with only three paternal lines remaining.

The Institute of Animal breeding and genetics of the Veterinary Medicine School at Vienna applied fine-scaled Y-chromosomal haplotyping in horses and demonstrated the potential of this approach to address the ancestry of sire lines. They were able to show the microcosmos of the Tb-clade in the thoroughbred sire lines.

It is interesting to note that more than half of the domestic horses in the dataset (76 of 130) have a Y chromosome with a thoroughbred ‘signature’. These includes thoroughbreds, standardbreds, many thoroughbred-influenced breeds (warmbloods, American quarter horses, Franches-Montagnes), a Lipizzan stallion, and the Akhal-Tekes.)

The General Stud Book shows that thoroughbred sire lines trace back to three founding stallions that were imported to England at the end of the 17th century. Now, the heritage of the thoroughbred sire lines can be better understood using Y chromosome information. It is now possible to clearly distinguish sublines of Darley Arabian, born in 1700 (Tb-d) and Godolphin Arabian, born in 1724 (formerly Tb-g, now Tb-oB3b). The third founder, Byerley Turk, born in 1680, was characterized by the Tb-oB1 clade. According to pedigree information, only few of the tested males trace back paternally to Byerley Turk, which are nearly extinct.

There are now 10 different Y chromosome sub-types known in the thoroughbred. Two come from the Godolphin Arabian, five come from Byerley Turk, and three come from Darley Arabian.

Even if genetic analysis shows that there was an error in the stud book recording of St Simon’s parentage and that horses descending from St Simon should be attributed to the Byerley Turk lineage, probably 90% of the current stallions are from the Darley Arabian male line. So, there is a true risk that we could lose a major part of the Y chromosome diversity.

Conclusions and solutions

We should do everything we can to ensure that thoroughbreds are being sustainably bred and managed for future generations. With the breeding goal to produce viable racehorses, we need to ask ourselves, are we on track as breeders? 

If inbreeding is negatively affecting the chances of racing and resulting in less durable racehorses, will this continue to affect foal crops in the future? How can we avert the threat of breeding horses that are less able to race? If the ability to race is in jeopardy, then is the existence of the thoroughbred breed at risk? 

International breeding authorities are studying the situation and thinking about general measures allowing the sustainability of the breed.

Breeders

What can individual breeders do to produce attractive foals that are safe from genetic threats? How do you avoid the risk of breeding horses that are less fit to race? 

There is no miracle recipe, and each breeder legitimately has his preferences.

An increasingly important criteria for the choice of a stallion is his physical resistance and his vitality, as well as those of his family. It is often preferable to avoid using individuals who have shown constitutive weaknesses, or who seem to transmit them.

The use of stallions from different male lines can make it possible to sublimate a strain and better manage the following generations. The study of pedigrees must exceed the three generations of catalog pages.

In the future, genomics—the science that studies all the genetic material of an individual or a species, encoded in its DNA—will certainly be able to provide predictive tools to breeders. This is a track to follow.

Trainers

Trainers should be aware of the danger of ‘diminishing returns,’ where excessive inbreeding occurs. Today, when animal welfare and the fight against doping are essential parameters, it is obvious that trainers must be aware of the genetic risks incurred by horses possibly carrying genetic defects.

Together with bloodstock agents, trainers are the advisers for the owners when buying a horse. Trainers already know some special traits of different families or stallions, but genomic tools might become essential for them too.

Sources

1. Genomic inbreeding trends, influential sire lines and selection in the global Thoroughbred horse population Beatrice A. McGivney 1, Haige Han1,2, Leanne R. Corduff1, Lisa M. Katz3, Teruaki Tozaki 4, David E. MacHugh2,5 & Emmeline W. Hill ; 2020. Scientific Reports | (2020) 10:466 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-57389-5

2. Inbreeding depression and durability in the North American Thoroughbred horse Emmeline W. Hill, Beatrice A. McGivney, David E. MacHugh; 2022. Animal Genetics. 2023;00:1–4. _wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/age

3. Founder-specific inbreeding depression affects racing performance in Thoroughbred Horses. Evelyn T. Todd, Simon Y. W. Ho, Peter C. Thomson, Rachel A. Ang, Brandon D. Velie & Natasha A. Hamilton; 2017. Scientific Reports | (2018) 8:6167 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-24663-x

4. The horse Y chromosome as an informative marker for tracing sire lines Sabine Felkel, Claus Vogl , Doris Rigler, Viktoria Dobretsberger, Bhanu P. Chowdhary, Ottmar Distl , Ruedi Fries , Vidhya Jagannathan, Jan E. Janečka, Tosso Leeb , Gabriella Lindgren, Molly McCue, Julia Metzger , Markus Neuditschko, Thomas Rattei , Terje Raudsepp, Stefan Rieder, Carl-Johan Rubin, Robert Schaefer, Christian Schlötterer, Georg Thaller, Jens Tetens, Brandon Velie, Gottfried Brem & Barbara Wallner; 2018. Scientific Reports | (2019) 9:6095 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42640-w

5. Identification of Genetic Variation on the Horse Y Chromosome and the Tracing of Male Founder Lineages in Modern Breeds Barbara Wallner, Claus Vogl, Priyank Shukla, Joerg P. Burgstaller, Thomas Druml, Gottfried Brem

Institute of Animal Breeding and Genetics, Depart. 2012. PLOS ONE | www.plosone.org  April 2013, Volume 8, Issue 4, e60015

6. New genetic evidence proves that the recorded pedigrees of the influential leading sires Bend Or and St. Simon were incorrect. Alan Porter; ITB 2021

7. Eight Belle’s breakdown: a predictable tragedy William Nack; ESPN.com 2008.

8. Suzi Prichard-Jones: Founder of "The Byerley Turk & Godolphin Arabian Conservation Project".

Special thanks to Emmeline Hill for her help in the completion of this article

Equine Neck CT: Advancing diagnostic precision in racehorses

Words - Rachel Tucker MRCVS

Introduction

When considering neck disorders in the racehorse, we most commonly think of severe conditions such as acute neck trauma and cervical vertebral myelopathy (Wobbler Syndrome). These represent the most severe end of the scale of orthopedic and neurologic injury to the neck; and a diagnosis, or at least prognosis, is usually clear. However, neck conditions encompass a far wider range of clinical presentations. 

At the milder end of the scale, signs may be subtle and easily missed, whilst still being responsible for discomfort and reduced performance. The recent ability to perform a computed tomography (CT) scan of a horse’s neck represents a major advancement in our ability to diagnose neck conditions. Timely and accurate diagnosis allows efficient and targeted treatment, the ability to plan schedules and improvement in welfare through the provision of appropriate treatment and earlier return to function. 

In neurologic cases, an accurate diagnosis facilitates risk management for both the horse, their handlers and riders, while improving safety for all.  As conditions and injuries of the neck are being better characterized using CT, new medical and surgical treatment options are being developed, giving the potential for improved outcomes and fewer losses from the racing industry. 

This article summarizes how CT is being increasingly used by vets to diagnose conditions of the neck and how it is revealing previously unknown information and providing exciting new treatment opportunities. 

Presentation

Conditions of the neck can cause a range of signs in the horse, which are wide-ranging in their presentation and variable in their severity. The manner in which these conditions present depends on which anatomical structures are affected. Issues affecting the bones, joints and/or soft tissues of the neck can all cause neck pain, which can manifest in a number of ways. Cases of neck pain can be severe, resulting in a horse with a rigid, fixed neck carriage, an unwillingness to walk and struggling to eat, perhaps due to a traumatic event. Neck fractures are thankfully uncommon but can be catastrophic. 

More moderate signs might be displayed as a stiff neck, with reduced range of movement and resentment of ridden work. There may be pain on palpation of the neck and changes in the neck musculature. Increasingly, we are seeing horses with far more subtle signs, which are ultimately revealed to be due to neck pain and neck pathology. Typically, these horses might have an acceptable range of motion of their neck under most circumstances, but they suffer pain or restriction in certain scenarios, resulting in poor performance. This may be seen as tension through the neck, resisting rein contact, a reluctance to extend the neck over fences, or they may struggle on landing. 

Riders might report a feeling of restriction or asymmetry in the mobility of the neck. In addition, these horses may be prone to forelimb tripping or show subtle forelimb lameness. 

Any condition, which causes injury or disease to the spinal cord or nerves within the neck, also causes a specific range of neurologic signs. Compression of the spinal cord is most commonly caused by malformations or fractures of the cervical vertebrae, or enlargement of the adjacent articular process (facet) joints. This results in classic ‘Wobbler’ symptoms, which can range from subtle weakness and gait abnormalities, through to horses that are profoundly weak, ataxic and uncoordinated. This makes them prone to tripping, falling, or they may even become recumbent. 

Peripheral nerve deficits are uncommon but become most relevant if they affect the nerves supplying the forelimbs, which can result in tripping, forelimb lameness, or local sensory deficits. This lameness might be evident only in certain circumstances, such as when ridden in a rein contact. This lameness is difficult to pinpoint as there will be no abnormality to find in the lame limb, indeed a negative response to nerve and joint blocks (diagnostic analgesia) will usually be part of the diagnostic process.

Horses can present with varying combinations and severities of neck pain, neurologic signs and peripheral nerve deficits, creating a wide range of manifestations of neck related disease. 

Diagnosis

A diagnosis of neck pain is based on careful static and dynamic clinical examination and may be supported by seeing a positive response to treatment. Neurologic deficits are noted during a specific neurologic assessment, which includes a series of provocation tests such as asking a horse to walk over obstacles, back up, turn circles and walk up and down a hill. Confirming neck pathology as the cause of signs can be difficult. Until recently, radiography has been the mainstay imaging modality. Radiographs are useful for assessment of the cervical vertebrae and continue to play an important role in diagnosis; however the complex 3-dimensional shape of these bones, the large size of the neck and an inability to take orthogonal (right-angled) x-ray views means that this 2-dimensional imaging modality has significant limitations. High quality, well-positioned images are essential to maximize the diagnostic potential of radiographs. 

A turning point in our diagnostic ability and understanding of neck dysfunction has been the recent adaptation of human CT scanners to allow imaging of the horse’s neck. A number of equine hospitals across the United Kingdom and Northern Europe now offer this imaging modality. We have been providing this service at Liphook Equine Hospital since 2017, with over 150 neck scans performed to date.

The CT procedure

A computed tomography (CT) scan combines a series of x-ray images taken from different angles around the area of interest to create a 3-dimensional volume of imaging data. This data is presented as a grayscale image which can be viewed in any plane and orientation. It provides excellent bone detail, and post processing techniques can provide information on soft tissue structures too. Additional techniques can be employed such as positive contrast myelography to provide greater detail about soft tissue structures. Myelography delineates the spinal cord using contrast medium injected into the subarachnoid space and is indicated in any case showing neurologic signs suggestive of spinal cord compression. 

Neck CT is performed under a short general anesthetic. Scans without myelography typically take less than 20 minutes to complete. The entire neck is imaged, from the poll to the first thoracic vertebra. The procedure is non-invasive and low risk, with anesthetic-related complication presenting the main risk factor to the procedure. We have not encountered any significant complications in our plain CT scan caseload to date. Horses showing ataxia, weakness and incoordination (Wobbler’s), undergo CT myelography which adds around 20 minutes to the procedure. These horses are exposed to a greater level of risk due to their neurologic condition, the injection of a contrast agent and the increased chance of destabilizing a more severe lesion during the procedure. 

CT is revealing more detailed information about ways that spinal cord compression can occur in Wobbler cases, about compression of spinal nerves resulting in forelimb gait deficits and precise detail about fracture configurations. It gives us detailed images of articular process joint disease, intervertebral disc disease, developmental conditions and anatomic variations. It is also revealing information about rare diseases such as vertebral abscesses or spinal neoplasia. As our caseload and confidence in the imaging modality grows, we are learning more about the value of CT in examining more subtle neck conditions. We are also bringing the benefit of a more accurate diagnosis, allowing precise targeted treatment and a better ability to provide a prognosis about outcomes—likely progression or safety factors. CT myelography allows circumferential imaging of the spinal canal and yields significantly more information than traditional x-ray myelography. As a result, we hope to enable better case selection of horses that may benefit from Wobbler surgery, with the goal of resulting in improved success rates of the surgery.

Innovations in treatment

New treatment options are emerging as a result of our more accurate diagnoses of neck pathology. Of the first 55 horses which underwent neck CT at our hospital, we were surprised to discover that 13 (24%) had some form of osteochondral fragmentation within the articular process joints of their neck. Some of these horses were young Thoroughbreds, bred to race but showing Wobbler signs. These tended to have convincing CT evidence of type 1 CVM (Wobbler Syndrome) and osteochondrosis affecting their neck. Others had fragments which were larger and more discrete, with evidence of articular process joint enlargement/arthritis but no other bony lesions. These horses were typically older and of a range of breeds and uses. 

In those horses presenting with signs of neck pain but no neurologic deficits, surgical removal of these fragments was proposed. Following further consideration and cadaver training, we have begun to offer this surgery for horses that fit the appropriate criteria and have surgically accessible fragments.  We have performed arthroscopic or arthroscopic-assisted fragment removal from eight articular process joints in six horses to date. No intraoperative or postoperative complications have been encountered; and five of six horses showed complete resolution of neck pain. In the sixth horse, full recovery was not anticipated due to the presence of additional neck pathology, but partial improvement occurred for two years.  Fragment removal has relieved signs of neck pain and stiffness and caused improved performance in these horses. 

Two procedures that are emerging to treat spinal nerve root impingement are a targeted peripheral nerve root injection and a keyhole surgical procedure to widen the intervertebral foramen. Nerve root injection is performed in the standing sedated horse under ultrasound guidance. Surgery is performed under anesthesia, using specialized minimally invasive equipment to widen the bony foramen using a burr. This surgery is in its infancy but offers an exciting treatment option.  

Additionally, CT gives us the ability to better plan for fracture repair, undoubtedly improving our case selection for Wobbler surgery; it more accurately guides intra-articular injection of the articular process joints. 

 Summary

Computed tomography is transforming our ability to diagnose conditions of the horse’s neck. The procedure is low risk and now widely available in the UK and other parts of Europe. It is driving the innovation of novel treatment options with the goal of improving outcomes and reducing losses to conditions of the neck. Our CT findings are posing new questions about neck function, pain and neurologic disease and is an active area of ongoing research.

References:

Schulze N., Ehrle, A., Beckmann, I and Lischer, C. (2021) Arthroscopic removal of osteochondral fragments of the cervical articular process joints in three horses. Vet Surg. ;1-9. 

Swagemakers J-H, Van Daele P, Mageed M. Percutaneous full endoscopic foraminotomy for treatment of cervical spinal nerve compression in horses using a uniportal approach: Feasibility study. Equine Vet J. 2023. 

Tucker R, Parker RA, Meredith LE, Hughes TK, Foote AK. Surgical removal of intra-articular loose bodies from the cervical articular process joints in 5 horses. Veterinary Surgery. 2021;1-9.

Wood AD, Sinovich M, Prutton JSW, Parker RA. Ultrasonographic guidance for perineural injections of the cervical spinal nerves in horses. Veterinary Surgery. 2021; 50:816–822. 

How racing is making strides into Big Data

Words - Alysen Miller

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have noticed many male footballers wearing what appears to be a sports bra during training and matches. This is not a political statement, a show of solidarity with their female counterparts, perhaps; nor is it the latest fashion craze. Rather the bras are, in reality, GPS tracker vests. Containing a small Global Positioning System gadget, they allow team managers and trainers to collect and analyze players’ individualized GPS data in order to make informed decisions about tactics and training.

Like all big-money sports, the top football clubs now employ legions of data nerds to crunch the numbers on all aspects of their players’ performances. Premier League football club, Arsenal, uses the STATSports system to gather physical data on all their players, from the under-12s to the men’s and women’s first teams. Marketed as “the most advanced wearable tech on the market” (that’s the famous bra), it records some 250 separate metrics, including accelerations and decelerations, average heart rate, calories burned, distance per minute, high-speed running, high-intensity distance, max speed, sprints and strain. The statistics are available live during training sessions so coaches can make real-time adjustments where necessary. 

And it goes beyond wearable tech. Players at last year’s World Cup in Qatar were able to get insights into their on-field performance through FIFA’s own player app. Physical performance metrics were collected through a highly accurate in-stadium tracking system, including multiple cameras located around the pitch. These included distance covered at various speed thresholds, number of actions above 25 miles per hour (about 40 kilometers per hour), and maximum speed – all displayed on positional heat maps. Thanks to this data, we know that Kylian Mbappé hit a top speed of 35.3 kilometers per hour (about 22 miles per hour) against Poland in the round of 16. Impressive for a two-legged athlete, even if he won’t be giving the likes of Flightline or Baaeed a run for their money.

Football is following in the footsteps of baseball and American football by embracing “Big Data”. Not only does this enhance teams’ abilities to play and train, it adds another dimension to the spectator experience. Who doesn’t want to know how far their favorite player ran? Horse racing, by contrast, still relies on a mathematical speed model, Timeform, developed in the 1950s.

“When you look at other professional sports, racing’s a fair way behind in terms of how we measure the athlete,” says David Hawke. “Basically, we don’t measure the athlete in a biometric sense at all, whereas most other professional sports measure their athletes in competition, when the athletes are at their highest output and highest exertion. And this is the crucial point.” Hawke is hoping to change all that. He is the managing director of StrideMaster, a system that combines GPS and motion capture technologies to produce detailed insights into the horse’s performance. 

“When we developed the technology, back in 2010, it was essentially technology for race day: tracking horses, getting all their times—all the normal race track performance information that punters might want to see,” he explains. In the course of gathering this information, Hawke accumulated a treasure trove of biometric data. In 2018, he joined up with Dr David Lambert. Kentucky-based Dr Lambert is an expert on equine physiology and the founder of a company called Equine Analysis Systems, which leverages this understanding of how the horse moves to select elite, high-performance thoroughbreds. 

He is looking for the top one percent, the cream of the crop. Hawke’s idea was to take this hypothesis and turn it on its head; in other words, to find the one percent “who were in trouble.” In this way, by identifying the horses that are trying to cope with a problem, vets and trainers would have a crucial data point which could be used to help prevent injuries before they happen.

So how does it work? Here comes the science part. Essentially, every horse has a unique stride “fingerprint.” Thanks to Hawke’s data, we not only know what that fingerprint looks like, but also when the horse deviates substantially from that fingerprint.

 The first step is to collect high-resolution data of the horse at the gallop. This is because, as prey animals, horses are disinclined to show lameness at the walk or trot (the traditional way of assessing a horse’s soundness). “The forces that are at play when a horse is going at 40 miles per hour compared to when it’s being trotted up at five miles per hour are completely different,” says Hawke. “The price that the horse pays for going fast is that it gives up autonomy over a number of things,” he continues. “It gives up autonomy over its breathing, for example. It becomes a mechanical breather. It also gives up autonomy over its footfall. If it’s got a raging foot abscess at the walk or the trot, it will decide not to put its foot down. But at the gallop, it can’t do that. It has no choice over when it puts each foot down. So the only option it’s got left to manage an issue that’s impacting it is postural change: it’s going to hold itself differently; it’s going to use different muscles to try and take the pressure off.” 

To capture these changes, samples are taken from three axes: the vertical, the longitudinal and the medial. This data is captured by a device about the size of an iPhone that’s slipped into the saddle cloth. These samples are then broken down further: “We split the stride up into three parts,” Hawke explains. “We have the hind leg stance phase, which is the primary propulsion and power source for the horse. Hind leg spring function is absolutely critical to a good stride, so if anything’s wrong at the back end, that immediately gets transferred to the front end on the corresponding diagonal. Then we have the forelimb stance phase. And then we have the flight phase, or the collection phase, when the horse is off the ground. The flight phase is where the horse is making most of its postural adjustments in the air. So if it’s got a problem it’s managing, it’s trying desperately to accommodate that problem during the stride. And then when it goes into the air, it’s trying desperately to get itself ready for the next stride to do it all over again.”

The system is capable of detecting minute variations in the horse’s stride that are effectively invisible to the human eye. “From an observational point of view, humans can’t detect these sorts of changes that we’re picking up. It’s simply happening too fast,” he says. The sample rate in StrideMaster’s sensors is 800 hertz, or 800 frames per second. The human eye, by contrast, cannot directly perceive more than about 60 frames per second. “That enables us to look at the stride in a very high level of detail,” he says. 

Hawke has accumulated so much data that it’s no longer necessary to have historic data on an individual horse in order to make a judgment about its soundness. Rather, there exists an “ideal” fingerprint for different categories of horse: “We have a Gp.1 fingerprint, we have a Gp.2 fingerprint, right down to a $10,000 claimer fingerprint, to use the American parlance,” he explains. In other words, soundness can be assessed against an ideal archetype. If a horse is more than two standard deviations outside of this ideal, that is considered an adverse change that the system then flags for the attention of the trainer.

So how is this “deviation” measured? “We’re tracking two or three things that are important: we’re tracking the amount of power they produce, and we’re tracking the amount of vibration they produce,” Hawke explains. Vibration is, essentially, any rapid change in acceleration. That is what is most likely to cause injury. Think of the horse as a four-cylinder engine, with the legs as the pistons. Each piston—or leg—moves in a set rhythm. As long as this rhythm is maintained, vibration will be kept to a minimum. But changes in rhythm (for example, because the horse is managing a problem) generate vibration which, in turn, generates damage. The sounder the horse, in other words, the less vibration. But with great power comes the potential to generate huge amounts of vibration. This explains why most of the horses that get flagged are competitive horses in whatever cohort they’re in. “They’re not horses that are running 20 lengths down the track,” says Hawke. “Generally, those horses are not producing enough power or vibration to get themselves into trouble. [The good horses] will always find a way to go fast,” he says.

While Hawke sees the technology primarily as an injury prevention tool, he acknowledges that its potential is broader than that: “From a social license point of view, that’s where the pressure is: to manage these injury rates and welfare outcomes better than we have been. So that’s the primary focus,” he says. But the same technology could, in theory, be used to identify future elite performers: 

“When you compare, say, a Gp.1 horse to a low-rating handicapper, what we see is increased deviation from optimum,” he explains. “To take a metric at random: gravity. The acceleration of an object toward the ground caused by gravity alone, near the surface of Earth, is called ‘normal gravity,’ or 1g. This acceleration is equal to 32.2 ft/sec2 (9.8 m/sec2). If you drop an apple on Earth, it falls at 1g”. 

“The Gp.1 horse will be much closer to that 1g than the lower rating handicapper,” he explains. “[The lower-rated horse] is not as efficient. They’re losing power in all directions. They’re going up and down more, they’re going side to side more. Whereas the elite horse actually generates surprisingly less power, but it’s all pointing down the road in the right direction.”

Hawke is keen to emphasize that he is not marketing a diagnostic tool. Rather, trainers should see this technology as another tool in their toolkit: “When the trainer gets the information, either they come and seek more information or talk to their vets about what’s going on. The vet can review the stride on a stride-by-stride basis. And when we get down to that level of detail, we can actually, on most occasions, give some indication of what quadrant the problem is emanating from.”

But what if you could identify such problems without even galloping the horse? 

Stephen O’Dwyer thinks he has a solution. O’Dwyer is the founder of Irish start-up TrojanTrack, which uses video cameras to record the horse at the walk and, from there, identify any variations in its movement. “We take video data of 52 different parts of the horse at 120 frames per second,” he explains. “We then convert those parts into biomechanical data: joint velocities, accelerations, angles. And then we can compare that to the horse’s healthy baseline movement to track any deteriorations or imbalances that might be creeping in.” But wait. Horses are prey animals. Won’t they naturally try to mask any injuries at the walk? “Horses are herd animals, so rather than show any sign of injury, they try to hide it as much as possible, and that means compensating on a different limb or something like that,” O’Dwyer acknowledges. “But because we’re tracking 52 points, we’re able to pick up any tiny deviations, tiny nuances that won’t be picked up by the human eye. 

“In talking to a few of the vets, they say that when the horse is in its walk, it’s at its most comfortable,” he continues. “And because they’re in their most comfortable state, they won’t be trying to hide their injury as much.” O’Dwyer plans to incorporate trot movements in the future.

Like Hawke, O’Dwyer sees his technology primarily as another arrow in the trainer’s quiver, rather than a diagnostic tool. “It’s hard for the trainer to pick up on the whole horse at once,” he explains. “They might be staring at one limb while the hip isn’t moving, and they’d have to walk by again and check the hip, and then they’re not looking at another limb. We look at all four limbs landing, the hip movement as one of the limbs is landing. So it’s the whole package of the horse in one to really show the trainer exactly what is going on.”

O’Dwyer acknowledges that the technology is still in its nascency. He is currently running customer trials a couple of yards in Ireland while he tries to drum up the next round of investment. StrideMaster, meanwhile, has been adopted by racing authorities in the United States and in Hawke’s native Australia. But any technologies that can help spot potentially catastrophic injuries before a horse hits the track must be taken extremely seriously by an industry that can, at times, feel like it is operating on the razor’s edge of public acceptability. As Hawke says, “The first priority is welfare because we have to look after the animal. If we’re not seen to be looking after the animal, the whole game’s in trouble.”

It seems like it is only a matter of time before racing joins the ranks of other sports in embracing Big Data. Says Hawke: “If I walked into a major football club and said, ‘Who here’s got expertise in biometric sensor analysis,' half the football department would put their hand up because they’ve been doing it for 20 years. But the information can be used in so many different ways in terms of performance, breeding and training techniques. We’re just scratching the surface.”

#Soundbites - Which other trainer do you most admire on the backstretch, and why?

Article by Bill Heller

Bret Calhoun

Brendan Walsh

Wayne Lukas never ceases to amaze me. He’s out there every morning. He’s at the sales and still competing at the highest level. He’s a guy that amazes me.

Brendan Walsh

There are a lot of trainers on the backstretch that I admire for different things. Some are good with stakes horses. Some of them are good with young horses. There’s almost too many to mention. I don’t really want to name one.

Todd Fincher

The ones I admire the most are the ones who started in the grass roots and worked their way up and became successful. Most of those guys have a true love of horse racing. It’s not an easy profession. It’s an unending job. Those guys that fought through adversity are the ones that I admire most.

Peter Miller

There are a lot of them I admire. Here in Southern California, I admire Richard Mandella and John Sheriffs because they limit the number of horses they take. I can’t do that. I’m a horse junkie. I admire Brad Cox and Steve Asmussen because they run such a huge operation with success at all levels. That shows a lot of organizational skills as well as horsemen skills. They also know how to delegate. I don’t even know how they do it. You can also throw in Todd Pletcher and Chad Brown. I’m at 80 horses, and I’m at my wit’s end!

Gary Contessa

That is a no-brainer: Wayne Lukas. He revolutionized the entire racing industry, and people took his lead. He came to the East Coast, and he showed us how to talk to clients; showed us how to develop young horses; and showed us what a barn should be like. Look at the history. What trainer in America has developed more good trainers than he has? Nobody. He’s developed horses and people.

Ron Moquett

There’s a lot of people you admire for different reasons. Probably the older guys like Bernie Flint, Jinks Fires and Wayne Lukas. They’re forever evolving. To be involved in this business for so many years and compete at a high level, it’s impressive. They do it year after year.

Larry Rivelli

Larry Rivelli

Wesley Ward—because he’s one of the very few jockeys that have become successful trainers. A lot of them tried and failed. He didn’t. He’s at an elite level.

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Richard Nicolai (Fortune Farm) – Secret Money

Article by Bill Heller

Before he began in Thoroughbred racing, Richard Nicolai was a devout harness racing fan. Born in Pleasantville, New York, north of Yonkers, he spent many nights at Yonkers Raceway and Roosevelt Raceway. “I was always a horse lover—all kinds of horses,” he said. “I owned a few saddle horses. I rode.”

After getting married, he moved to Long Island, where he began and ran a business of manufacturing light fixtures for 35 years. He spent many nights at Roosevelt Raceway, which once hosted the top level of harness racing in the country. “I was there every night,” Nicolai said. “I had dinner every night at the Cloud Casino. It was so exciting to be under the lights. I loved everything about it.”

Then he got more involved, first by jogging horses, than training them on and off for three years. He had a chance meeting with legendary driver/trainer Billy Haughton one night at Wolverine Racetrack in Michigan. “I walked up to him, and we talked about racing for hours,” Nicolai said. “I learned so much from Billy Haughton. I was just a little guy with a couple of horses, and he treated me with respect. I’ll never forget it.” 

Ten years later, he got involved with Thoroughbreds, first with partners. His second Thoroughbred, Not So Fast, won the 2000 Stymie Handicap for trainer Bruce Levine. Not So Fast would post 10 victories, eight seconds and five thirds from 38 starts, making $318,777.

When he retired in 2019, he was happily able to devote himself exclusively to his horses. “The horses take all my time,” Nicolai said. He is happy to share that time with his wife, Lynn, their 44-year-old son Adam, an oral surgeon, and his 44-year-old daughter Hope, a dentist. “My wife loves it,” he said. “She comes to the sales and to the races. The kids are always watching our horses.”

He named his stable Fortune Farm, and he was the sole owner of Sue’s Fortune, a daughter of Jump Start out of Democrat Taxes by Catienus, who’s three victories in six starts included the 2018 Gr. 2 Adirondack Stakes at Saratoga for trainer Jeremiah Englehart. She was also second by three-quarters of a length in the $139,000 Jersey Girl Stakes. She earned $221,700. “She’s a home-bred,” Nicolai said. “I still have her mother.”

His partnership with long-time friends Bob Hahn and Matt Hand reached a high point with Secret Money, a Good Samaritan filly out of Awesome Humor by Distorted Humor, which they purchased as a two-year-old in May 2022, for just $40,000. Secret Money won a lot of money when he captured the $1 million Gr. 3 Big Ass Fans Music City Stakes by one length at Kentucky Downs, September 2. Brendan Walsh is her trainer.

Hahn was euphoric, watching the race from his home in Hilton Head, South Carolina: “My wife and I were screaming. We scared the neighbors. We’d never even been in a million-dollar race.”

He thanks his grandfather for his love of racing. “I was the designated go-along to make sure that he had company,” Hahn said.  “We went to Monmouth, Aqueduct and Keystone.”

He’s delighted with his partners: “Richard and Matt are the greatest guys to work with. They’re honest as the day is long. We all had our separate ways and decided to put our heads together.”

Nicolai said, “Bob is a breeder, as I am. He had a few good horses over the years. Matt is younger than us. He’s a very smart guy, very analytical and a great partner. We just bought two nice Street Sense fillies for $375,000 at the Keeneland September Yearling Sales.”

Nicolai said a lot of his success has been thanks to Travis Durr at the Travis Durr Training Center in St. Matthews, South Carolina: “He looks for yearlings for me. He starts with hundreds of horses and sends me a short list. That’s how we got Secret Money.”

Secret Money has three wins and a third from her first six starts with earnings of $740,311.

“We bought her very cheap,” Durr said. “We did the right thing by her. And it paid off. She’s a real nice filly.”

Durr said he and his wife, Ashley, who helps run the training center, have known the Nicolais, Richard and Lynn, for about 12 years: “In the past few years, he’s been doing more and more. He’s kind of stepped up and bought up, not relying just on home-breds. He’s trying to get a better horse. He’s got a lot of patience. He’s a great guy, a family guy. He’s got a lot of trust in us. We’ve gotten close to him and his wife. They’re like family.”

Nicolai now has 25 broodmares, half a dozen weanlings, four yearlings and six racehorses. “I’m a partner on another eight horses,” he said.

Walsh has done a great job with this filly. “We were looking for a good trainer with a good reputation with turf horses,” Nicolai said. “I’ve sent him several turf horses. We’ve been together for three years. I have good partners and a great trainer.”

And he loves horses as much as he ever did. “First of all, I love the competition. I got very interested in breeding and pedigrees. I study pedigrees. I have so much fun seeing how horses turn out. I enjoy that. My wife enjoys that, too.”

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Bill and Tammy Simon (WSS Racing) – Brightwork

Article by Bill Heller

Bill Simon, the former president and CEO of Walmart, quickly learned the difference between Walmart and racing. “There’s no everyday low pricing in horse racing,” he laughed.

Simon was at Walmart from 2006–2015. “Do I miss it?” he said. “I miss the people. But I don’t miss a million and a half people reporting to me. When I left Walmart, I was looking for something to share with my wife Tammy.  She grew up on a farm in North Carolina.”

Thoroughbreds seemed like a good fit. Success came surprisingly quickly.
“We’re very methodical,” Simon said. “I try to work with good people.” 

He certainly has two good people—his trainer John Ortiz and his bloodstock agent Jared Hughes. Oritz said his connection with the Simons “has been life-changing. They’re so supportive. They make me better, not only as a trainer, but also as a person.”

Ortiz knows he’s working with a remarkable person.

Born in Manchester, Connecticut, Simon graduated from the University of Connecticut, earning a Bachelor of Arts in economics and an MBA in management. While in college, he made his first trip to a racetrack, going to Saratoga Race Course.

He served in the U.S. Navy and Naval Reserves for 25 years, receiving commendations for combat service in Grenada and in Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. At Walmart, he was instrumental in the company’s pledge to hire any returning veteran.

Before Walmart, Simon worked at several global companies including Brinker International, Diageo, Cadbury-Schweppes, PepsiCo and RJR Nabisco. He developed and launched Smirnoff Ice in the United States.

In the public sector, he was secretary of the Florida Department of Management Services, dealing with health care benefits, human resources, the Florida retirement system, facilities management and real estate from 2002 through 2004. 

From 2018–2020, he served as chair of the Defense Business Board for Defense Secretary James Mathis. He is currently a senior advisor to the investment firm KKR and is the founder and president of WSS Venture Holdings.

Because of his vast experiences, Simon felt it unnecessary to hire a top-tier trainer and is very happy he chose Ortiz and Hughes. “I’ve already done a lot of things in life,” Simon said. “I traded spreadsheets and profits and losses statements for pedigrees and Racing Forms. It starts with two years trying to figure out where we could operate in this business. We started with claimers as everybody does. Then we focused on buying young horses.”

He’s delighted he has Ortiz and Hughes on his team: “I’m learning from Johnny and Jared. I have some things to teach them, too. I know how to run a business. This is a hard business. We grow together. Jared is a good horseman. John is an incredibly intuitive horseman. We have a better chance because we’re doing the work together. A lot of it is good, hard work.”

The work has paid off. Bill and Tammy found two relatively cheap stars. Barber Road, named for a road in North Carolina, cost $15,000. He broke his maiden in a $30,000 claimer. Simon told Molly Rollins in a March 8, 2022 story in the Blood-Horse, his rationale for the drop-down after Barber Road finished a distant fourth in a maiden special weight debut: “We knew he was special, but we thought, well, you know a $15,000 weanling running in a $30,000 maiden claimer—no one is going to take him; so why not give him a really good blow against an easier crowd and get things started? And that’s what we did. You have to be brave to take a $15,000 horse running for $30,000.”

After a 6 ¼-length romp in a starter allowance, Barber Road took the Simons on the 2022 Kentucky Derby trail, finishing second in the $200,000 Lively Shively Stakes, second in the $250,000 Smarty Jones Stakes and second again in the Gr. 3 Southwest Stakes. He was beaten just a half-length when third in the Gr. 2 Rebel, and finished second again in the Gr. 1 Arkansas Derby.

That led him to the 2022 Gr. 1 Kentucky Derby. He rallied from far back to finish sixth. “We had a huge Kentucky Derby party,” Tammy said. “It was really a neat thing for everybody. It was great. That meant so much to me and my family.,”

Barber Road finished seventh in the Belmont Stakes and most recently was fourth in the Gr. 3 Blame Stakes at Churchill Downs, June 3. He’s made just under $800,000.

The Simons’ undefeated two-year-old filly Brightwork, who upped her record to four-for-four by winning the Gr. 1 Spinaway Stakes at Saratoga September 3, cost $95,000 and has already earned $444,051. She’s never been the favorite in any of her starts, including a five-length romp in the Gr. 3 Adirondack Stakes before the Spinaway.

“I kind of like not being the favorite,” Tammy said. “That little filly has been amazing. To watch her come down that stretch at Saratoga—it was such an incredible feeling. Her breeders were also there with us. I turned around and every one of us was crying. It was John’s first Gr. 1 and our first Gr. 1. It was really special. She’s a diva. She knows she’s special.”

Her husband said he wasn’t too nervous before the race: “Whenever I get nervous, Johnny tells me in poker, you don’t know what other people’s hands are, but you know your hand. I loved my hand.”

After the Spinaway, he said of her half-length victory at Saratoga, “I never imagined we’d win at a place like that. Holy cow! I’m excited to see what she does next.” 

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Nick and Delora Beaver (Bell Gable Stable) – Nutella Fella

Article by Bill Heller

When Nick Beaver married Delora, he told her, “One of these days, I’d like to have a horse or two or three.” She replied, “You better make enough money to pay for it.”

He did exactly that – with her help. “When I came out of the [U.S.] Navy, I worked with a labor contractor,” Nick said. “I worked for them for about 10 years. Delora said, `Move out on your own.’ We haven’t looked back since. Now we have five companies.”

And horses. Since 2017. “I claimed a horse for $5,000 on a Thursday or a Friday,” Nick said. “By Sunday, we had three more.”

Nick Beaver grew up in racing, literally. His mother was a waitress in the clubhouse at Waterford Park, which is now Mountaineer Park in West Virginia. “I never had a dad,” Beaver said. “My mom raised four boys on her own. I was the youngest.”

In 2019, the Beavers decided to buy a pricey yearling at the Fasig-Tipton Mid-Atlantic Sale. “We looked at 10 or 12 yearlings,” Beaver said. “We focused on Maryland Brando, a colt by Flatter out of the More Than Ready mare Apple Cider. “The reserve was going to be $100,000,” Beaver said. “We bought him for $250,000.”

Beaver decided he needed another trainer for such a nice horse and reached out to Gary Contessa, a successful trainer in New York who had recently left the business. “I had a bunch of claimers and barely made enough,” Contessa said. “I had enough with the Department of Labor.”

Beaver reached out to Contessa: “I asked him if he would decide what to do with this horse. Gary came down to Delaware. This horse dragged Gary back into the business. I asked him what it would take for you to train this horse. He said, `Being your private trainer.’ I asked Delora. She said, `That works.’ He became our trainer.”

Maryland Brando made a spectacular debut at Delaware Park, August 2, 2021, winning a maiden race by 11 ½ lengths. Maryland Brando then finished 10th in the Gr. 3 Sanford Stakes at Saratoga and a distant fifth in an allowance race in Delaware. Given a long time to recover, Maryland Brando returned in an allowance race at Laurel Park, April 14, 2022. He finished seventh by 20 lengths.

Things got worse. “One day, he got loose on the track,” Beaver said. “He ran through a fence and had to be euthanized. I cried. It was horrible. It was gut-wrenching.”

Then the Beavers went to the 2022 Keeneland September Sale. Instead of spending $250,000, they invested $12,000 to purchase Nutella Fella, a son of Runhappy out of Kristy’s Candy by Candy Ride. “He was in book six,” Beaver said. “It was really late in the sale. Nobody was bidding on him. He came out and looked good. Delora said, `Don’t go over $30,000.’ We get to $12,000. We got him. We were ecstatic. We liked Runhappy.” 

Contessa said, “He’s the spitting image of Runhappy. Looks just like his father.”

In 2023, Contessa switched from Bell Gable Stable’s private trainer to general manager with the stipulation that if one of their horses was good enough to race in New York, Contessa would train him.

“Nick grew up in a racing family,” Contessa said. “He was sleeping in the tack room. He’s a very passionate man about the game. He’s a good guy—a very smart guy.”

When Nutella Fella made his debut in a maiden race at Delaware Park on July 26, Richard Silliman was the trainer. 

And both Silliman and Contessa had a challenge. “He had no issues in the gate early in his training,” Beaver said. “One day in the gate, he freaks out. Something triggered it. He was a nutcase. He was flipping backwards before the gate. He became a nightmare. We worked with him. The Delaware gate crew tried using voice commands. They got him to walk into the gate.”

Nutella Fella’s final work before his debut revealed he had another trait—a very good one. “Our horse comes through the turn and almost collides with other horses,” Beaver said. “Then he got dirt kicked in his face. The minute that dirt hit him in the face, he became possessed. It made him mad. He took a hold of the bit. He went right past them.”

Contessa came to Delaware Park for Nutella Fella’s debut: “He was a handful in the paddock. A handful in the post parade. A handful at the gate. He did everything wrong. He broke dead last. And he won going away.”

The margin under Kevin Gomez was 2 ¼ lengths.

“Nick said, `I want you to take him to Saratoga and run in the Hopeful,’” Contessa said. “I picked him up and took him to Saratoga. He was really bad in the gate.”

A field of 10 contested the $300,000 Gr. 1 Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga on September 4. Junior Alvarado took the mount off Nutella Fella’s impressive final work, three furlongs in :34 4/5 breezing. Bettors weren’t impressed and sent him off at 54-1.

Nutella Fella literally walked out of the starting gate. “It was the same way at Delaware,” Contessa said. “He’s pulling Junior and I said, ' We might be okay here.’ He’s 100 percent racehorse.’” 

Yeah, but he was at least seven lengths behind the horse in next-to-last on the backstretch.

Alvarado’s ride was masterful, cutting inside of horses then angling out at 45-degrees to the far outside. Nutella Fella did the rest, winning by a length and a half.

At 54-1.

“We made so much money,” Beaver said. “We bet him to win and place.” Everyone in his family made money.

“People don’t believe this horse,” Delora said. “I get it. He has to prove it. We know he’s a good horse. We’ll see if he’s the real deal.” 

Barry Schwartz

Article by Bill Heller

What is more exciting for an owner and breeder than a two-year-old colt with talent? Former New York Racing Association Chairman of the Board and CEO Barry Schwartz’s New York-bred colt El Grande O certainly gives him reasons to dream. Off a head loss in the Funny Cide Stakes at Saratoga on August 27th, El Grande O dominated five rivals on a sloppy track at Aqueduct September 24, scoring by 8 ¼ lengths as the 3–5 favorite in the $125,000 Bertram F. Bongard Stakes under José Ortiz. Linda Rice trains the son of Take Charge Indy out of Rainbow’s Song by Unbridled’s Song who has two victories, three seconds and one third from his first six starts with earnings of $204,000.

El Grande O is Schwartz’s 26th Thoroughbred to win more than $200,000—a list that includes his top earners Boom Towner, Voodoo Song, The Lumber Guy, Kid Cruz, Princess Violet, Three Ring and Fire King. All of them earned between $700,000 and $1 million.

Now 81, Schwartz and his wife Sheryl still reside at their farm, Stonewall Farm, in northern Westchester County, with a second home on the ocean in California. Schwartz keeps busy playing the markets and running his horse stable.

The Calvin Klein years

It seems like forever since he and his childhood pal Calvin Klein, took Calvin Klein Inc. from a $10,000 initial investment to a global operation, which they sold for $430 million smack in the middle of Schwartz’s four-year reign at NYRA.

Schwartz and Klein, who both lived in the Bronx and had fathers who owned grocery markets in Harlem, went into their first partnership when they were nine, reselling newspapers and collecting bottles. “We’d go to the newsstand when the papers came in early evening,” Schwartz said. “We bought them for a nickel and sold them for a dime. We’d go to all the hotels, especially in the summer. On a good night, we’d make $3 apiece. That was a big deal then.”

When they began Calvin Klein Inc., they rented room 613 in the New York Hotel in Manhattan. The front door was open and faced the elevator. Calvin had the six women’s coats he had manufactured with Barry’s investment. 

One morning the elevator stopped on the sixth floor. One passenger walked out while another noticed the coats and got off. That passenger was Don O’Brien, the general manager of Bonwit Teller, one of New York’s most fashionable stores. 

Schwartz was home when Klein called him with great news: “You’ll never believe this. I got a $50,000 order from Bonwit Teller!” Schwartz replied, “Who’s Bonwit Teller?”  

He figured it out, and Calvin Klein, Inc. went onto incredible success.

The NYRA Years

In the four years Schwartz served as Chairman of the Board and CEO of NYRA from October 2000, to October 2004, racing in New York reached a pinnacle, a shining example of how racing should be operated—when fans and bettors mattered; when the right people in the right positions made the right decisions. 

It didn’t last. When Schwartz departed out of utter frustration from battling politicians and their inept decisions, racing in New York was never the same. It was almost like it was a mirage—a wonderful mirage.

But it was real. It was Camelot at Aqueduct, Belmont Park and Saratoga.

That he did this while he continued to operate Calvin Klein, Inc. is remarkable. To do it, he had to commute 30 to 45 minutes through New York traffic every morning. And he did NYRA pro bono.

Why? Because he cared deeply about racing, specifically New York racing. Schwartz’s goal at NYRA was straightforward: “to make New York racing No. 1 in the world.”

Schwartz, who had been a member of the NYRA Board since 1994, was approached by acting CEO and Chairman of the Board Kenny Noe, who had decided to retire in the fall of 2000. “I was excited to be asked,” Schwartz said. “I was flattered. My two biggest supporters were Kenny Noe and Dinny Phipps (head of the Jockey Club). Dinny pushed for it. I was kind of flabbergasted, but I was thrilled. I got really energized. It gave me purpose, something to sink my teeth into. I went gangbusters, all in.”

Klein backed Schwartz’s decision. “The best thing that happened was that there was a long time before I took over,” Schwartz said. “I could work out the schedule I’d have to use. I spoke with Calvin about it. He thought it was a good idea. He always said, `If you’re near a phone, what’s the big deal?’”

So he did both. “At NYRA, my first two years were wonderful,” Schwartz said. “My first two years were a honeymoon. The next two years were just horrible.”

On the first day Schwartz took over NYRA and the three racetracks it operates—Belmont Park, Saratoga and Aqueduct—Schwartz went on NYRA’s new website, which had been designed by his son-in-law Michael, and asked fans and bettors what changes they wanted NYRA to make.

Then he made the changes, empowering fans, bettors and handicappers because he has always been a fan, a bettor and a handicapper.

This was a seismic shift in racetrack management, giving the people who support racing with their hard-earned cash every day a chance to impact the process. 

“On the website, we asked fans what they wanted,” Schwartz said. “We did that several times. Everybody loved that. The bettors could participate in the process.”

Bettors had never been asked that.

“It was genuine,” Bill Nader, former NYRA senior vice president, said. “He cared. He knew they cared. They shared the passion. It was a mind-blowing experience. It was exceptional, and I thought it was great that he heard their voice, that he gave them a seat at the table. He listened to what they said. He wanted to grow the business. He wanted to improve the business. Without consulting the customer, how do you do this?”

That initial fan survey on NYRA’s website received more than 4,000 responses. Schwartz responded by immediately making changes. Uniform saddle cloth pads—the 1 horse is red, the 2 horse is blue, etc.— made it easier to follow horses during a race. Claims, when someone purchases a horse that had just raced, were announced to the public. Barry also instituted a shoe board displaying each horse’s shoe type before every race.

A couple months after those changes, Schwartz said, “It really is true: talking to the fans is important. I’m going to continue involving the fans as long as I’m here. Without them, there’s no sport.”

On his first day, he promoted Bill Nader from Simulcast Director to Senior Vice President of Racing and watched Nader become one of the most respected racing officials in the world, serving as director of racing in Hong Kong for 15 years before becoming the president and CEO of the Thoroughbred Owners of California, June 21, 2022.

Schwartz said, “Bill was grossly underpaid. I didn’t want to lose him. When I reviewed the personnel and salaries, this guy was so underpaid; and I wound up signing him to a three-year contract. I wanted to make sure that he stayed. He was really close to me. When I got my people together, Bill was clearly the smartest guy in the room. He was the best guy I had.” 

Nader told Schwartz, “Wow, I’m thrilled, but I’m surprised.” Schwartz responded, “No, I’ve been watching.”

Nader’s appreciation of Schwartz’s support and impact hasn’t subsided more than 20 years later. “From day one, he just got behind me. That’s a huge amount of trust. He made me. He was the one person that changed the course of my life, providing me with the opportunity at NYRA. Six years later, the door he opened for me at NYRA led me to Hong Kong. He changed the path of my life, and I will be forever grateful.”

Schwartz didn’t take long to help all his employees in the first year. “NYRA got $13 million from Nassau County because NYRA had been overbilled for taxes,” Schwartz said. “I gave everybody a five-percent raise and a five-percent Christmas bonus. It was a big deal for the employees. They had never gotten a Christmas bonus.”

There was a new vibe at NYRA, and you could feel it. “What differentiated Barry was Barry was a New York guy,” top jockey-turned TV commentator Richie Migliore said. “He created his success through hard work. He was as comfortable shooting pool in the jockey room as he was in the boardroom. I remember him beating Jorge Chavez, who thought he was a really good pool player. Barry smoked him.”

Breeders’ Cup 2001

There were many shining moments during Schwartz’s four years, perhaps none more important than supervising the 2001 Breeders’ Cup at Belmont Park just weeks after the tragedy of 9-11 had left a city and a nation broken.

Like every other person in America, Schwartz remembers vividly the horror of 9-11 unfolding: “I was home in New Rochelle, getting dressed and ready to go to the farm. We were building our house there. It was in the very beginning. I saw the first plane hit. I told Sheryl, some idiot just flew his plane into the Trade Center. A few minutes later, I’m driving to the farm, and we hear about the second plane hitting. We spent the whole day at the farm. It was a safe haven at a very scary time. Sheryl’s brother got my kids out of the city.”

Belmont Park, in Elmont, Long Island—just 12 miles from “ground zero”—had already been selected to host the 2001 Breeders’ Cup on October 27, less than two months later; and no one was quite certain if that was still going to happen. “We had conversations with everybody,” Schwartz said. “I was in the same camp as Dinny. I thought it was very important to show New York was alive and well.”

Breeders’ Cup President D.G. Van Clief Jr. issued a statement saying, “Obviously, on the morning of Sept. 11, the world changed, and it certainly changed our outlook on the 2001 World Thoroughbred Championships. But it is very important for us to stay with our plan. We’d like it to be a celebration and salute to the people of New York.” 

Schwartz leaned heavily on Nader to get it done. “It was challenging,” Nader said. “We literally worked 18 hours a day. There was the normal preparation. Then the security side. Nobody minded the extra hours. We wanted to be sure we didn’t miss a thing. It was the most rewarding race day of my career because of what it meant. We were beat up. We were sad. We were down. There was a clumsy period of what to do. What is appropriate? The uncertainty of running the Breeders' Cup at Belmont? For horse racing fans, it meant a lot that they could return to the track and feel good, feel alive. I believe it was the first international event held in New York after 9-11. For me, I’m not sure there has been a better day of racing than that.”

On October 11, Sheikh Mohammed al Maktoum’s private 747 arrived at JFK International Airport from England. On board, were three of Godolphin Stable’s best horses including Arc de Triomphe, Juddmonte International winner Sakhee and major stakes winner Fantastic Light. They were accompanied by two FBI agents, four customs agents and three carloads of Port Authority police. There were no incidents, and the European horses settled in at Belmont Park. 

The day broke sunny. There were shooters on the roofs of many Belmont Park buildings carrying AKA assault rifles. “They were very visible,” Schwartz said. “We had sharpshooters on the roof. I went up to the roof, and the guys were just laying down with rifles. It was scary.”

Nader said, “Seeing the snipers on the roof, I thought, how are people going to handle this? Once the races began to flow, it became one of the greatest events I’ve ever been involved in.”

At the opening ceremonies, dozens of jockeys accompanied by members of the New York State Police and Fire Departments lined up on the turf course, each jockey holding the flag of his country. Following a bagpipe rendition of “Amazing Grace,” Carl Dixon of the New York State Police Department sang the national anthem.

Hopes for an all-positive afternoon disappeared before the first Breeders’ Cup race, the Distaff, when Exogenous, who had won the Beldame and Gazelle Stakes, reared and flipped while leaving the tunnel, slamming her head on the ground. The filly was brought back to Hall of Fame trainer Scotty Schulhofer’s barn but died several days later. Her death was only two years after Schwartz lost his brilliant filly Three Ring when she fell and hit her head in the paddock and died in front of Schwartz and Sheryl before her race.

The climax of the day was the $4 million Breeders’ Cup Classic matching the defending champion, Tiznow, against Sakhee, European star Galileo and Albert the Great. In the final sixteenth of a mile, Sakhee took a narrow lead on the outside of Tiznow, who responded by battling back to win the race by a nose. Announcer Tom Durkin captured the moment beautifully, shouting, “Tiznow wins it for America!”

America had won just by running the Breeders’ Cup as planned. That made NYRA, Schwartz Nader, and the rest of their team, winners, too.

Breeders Cup 2022 – the pick-six scandal

A year later, a day after the 2002 Breeders’ Cup Classic at Arlington Park in Chicago, Nader’s quick actions saved racing from further embarrassment when three fraternity brothers from Drexel University were not paid on their identical six winning $2 Pick Six tickets worth a total of more than $3 million.

Nader hadn’t even attended the Breeders’ Cup that Saturday, but he was at Belmont Park the following morning when he noticed something strange about the Pick Six, which had just six winning tickets from a single place, Catskill (New York) Off-Track Betting. “I asked Jim Gallagher to get the configuration of the tickets,” Nader said. “I looked at it, and I said, `Oh, man, this is a real problem. This is a scam.’ Catskill had made up just one-tenth percent of the Pick Six pool. The tickets were the same ticket six times. And the singles were in the first four races with all the horses in the last two.

“Back then, you didn’t get paid until the weekend ended. I called Arlington Park. I begged them not to pay it. The guy said, `Okay, Bill. I won’t pay them until you tell me.’ Then I called the TRPB (Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau).”

The tickets had been altered after the fourth race to list only the winning horse. Subsequently, investigators found that the fixers had tested their scam twice before the Breeders’ Cup. Additionally, they also had been successfully cashing counterfeit tickets of uncashed tickets all over the East Coast. The scam had been exposed before the cheaters got paid.

Racing’s image took a big hit from this, but it would have been much worse if Nader hadn’t acted. “It meant a lot,” Schwartz said. “If it came out after it was paid, it would have been disastrous.” 

Backing José Santos

Seven months later, Hall of Fame jockey José Santos, who had won the 2002 Breeders’ Cup Classic on 43–1 Volponi for Hall of Fame trainer Phil Johnson, also won the 2003 Kentucky Derby on Funny Cide. A week later, the Miami Herald broke just about every journalism standard there is, alleging that Santos had used a buzzer to win the race from a single phone interview with Santos, whose English was pretty good but not 100 percent; and a single photo the Herald deemed suspicious. This created national and international headlines that Saturday morning, and Santos learned the bad news that morning at Belmont Park, when he was having breakfast with his son, José Jr., at the backside kitchen.

Schwartz responded immediately for NYRA. He got the “suspicious” photo blown up, and it showed conclusively that what looked like an object in Santos’ hand was just the view of the silks of Jerry Bailey riding Empire Maker behind Funny Cide. Besides that, Santos would have needed three hands to carry his whip, the reins and a buzzer.

“NYRA defended me 100 percent as soon as it came out,” Santos said 20 years later. “They did everything to clear my name.”

A hearing in Kentucky two days later confirmed how ludicrous the allegations had been—mistakes the Herald paid for in Santos’ successful lawsuit against the paper.

Schwatz’s legacy

Schwartz’s biggest contribution at NYRA was lowering takeout—the amount of money taken from people’s bets—which, in turn, increases handle, allowing corresponding increases in purse money. Schwartz’s simple logic, which he had used his whole life at Calvin Klein, Inc., dictated that if products aren’t selling, you lower the price. That couldn’t penetrate many of the blockheads in the racing industry who still have failed to grasp this simple concept. When Schwartz left, the takeout was increased and handle declined.

“He came in with a different lens than anyone before him,” Nader said. “He looked at it as a retail business. How do I grow the business? That was retail sales. In our business, it was betting. I think that’s why he really connected. He came in as an owner, breeder and fan. That was the added dimension he brought. That was something we had never seen before. Suddenly, the business was growing.”

The numbers showed that. When bettors get more money returned in payoffs, they bet more—a simple process called churn.

Through intense lobbying, Schwartz got the legislature to reduce the takeout on win bets from 15 percent to 14—one of the lowest in the nation; from 20 to 17.5 percent on two-horse wagers, and the takeout on non-carryover Pick Sixes from 25 percent to 20 and then to 15. “It took a long time to get the bill passed,” Schwartz said. “It passed 211–0. I personally lobbied in Albany to explain how lowering the takeout was good for everybody. Once I convinced them, they endorsed it. It passed both houses, and Governor Pataki signed it. I had a good rapport with him. He’d come to my house at Saratoga every summer. I got along very well with him.” 

The impact of lower takeout was immediate. It began at the 2001 Saratoga meet, and handle rose 4.9 percent to a record of $553 million. Attendance at the 36-day meet broke one million for the first time. At the ensuing Belmont Park Fall Meet, handle rose 28 percent. In its first full year with lower takeout in 2002, handle increased at NYRA by $150 million when compared to 2000—the last full year with higher takeout. Schwartz felt it was just a start. 

“My goal is for this to be so successful I can keep lowering it,” Schwartz said in a 2001 article by Michael Kaplan in Cigar Aficionado. “With a 10 percent takeout, the size of our handle will become enormous.”

Such thinking was revolutionary to how business had been done at America’s racetracks. “Business got tough, so racetrack operators all over the country raised their takeouts,” Schwartz said in Kaplan’s article. “You don’t do that. Where I come from, you lower your price when business is bad.”

In 2023, Schwartz was asked why racetracks around the country haven’t lowered takeout: “The people who run racetracks just don’t understand the sport.”

Schwartz certainly does.

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Michael Dubb – Therapist

Article by Bill Heller

Michael Dubb’s near 50-year voyage at Saratoga Race Course has been unique and complete. In 1973, at the age of 17, he slept in a van because he couldn’t afford a room to attend the races the following day. In 2021, the 65-year-old multiple leading owner in New York, who watches the races from his box seat, saw the opening of his Faith’s House, a daycare center at Saratoga Race Course for the children of backstretch workers that he built and donated so those children had an option other that sleeping in their parents’ car or spending their summers apart from their parents. Faith’s House is named for his mother.

Twenty years earlier, Dubb donated the materials and built Anna House, a daycare center at Belmont Park named for the daughter of late owner, Eugene Melnyk, who contributed $1 million to start the program. Anna House was the first program of any kind offering daycare for children of backstretch workers. Dubb has contributed renovations for both facilities.

Michael Dubb’s legacy won’t be the races he won, but the lives he changed. “It means a lot to me, more than winning races,” he said. “In racing, you need a foundation to win races. These kids needed a foundation for their lives.”

His would be a good one to emulate. 

The van he took to Saratoga was the same one he used for his fledgling landscaping business. “I bought my first landscaper when I was 16,” he said. “I slept in the van for a couple summers at Saratoga. I was in my van at Congress Park, and I got to listen to Richard Nixon resigning that August (1974).”

In 1985, Dubb began The Beechwood Organization, which has become the largest New York developer of family and multi-family attached housing. Beechwood has built more than 10,000 homes in 80 communities in New York City, Long Island, Saratoga Springs and North Carolina. Professional Builder magazine said Beechwood ranked 54th out of 240 housing giants and number 3 in New York in 2023. Dubb’s son Steven, is now a key player in Beechwood.

Dubb, a lifelong Long Islander, has spent much of his life giving back. He built homes for Long Islanders after Superstorm Sandy. The American Cancer Society, the American Jewish Committee, Family Service League, Rockaway Development & Revitalization Corporation, Mid Island YMCA/Jewish Community Center, Suffolk YMCA/Jewish Community Center, Tilles Center and Networking Magazine have honored Dubb for his philanthropy and community service.

While he has been a partner of top Thoroughbreds Monomoy Girl, British Idiom and Uni, he’s an astute horseman who has made a ton of claims—none more impressive than Therapist.

“He’s a pleasure,” Dubb said. “I competed against this horse for many years. I tried claiming him for $25,000, but I lost the shake. They put him in for $50,000. I got him. He’s just a hard-hitting older New York-bred horse. I’m fortunate to own one.”

Exactly three weeks after Dubb lost his $25,000 claim on a shake, Dubb claimed the eight-year-old gelding for $50,000 on June 20 at Gulfstream Park when he finished third as the 2-1 favorite. Switched from Geoge Weaver to Mike Maker, Therapist won a starter allowance on synthetic by 4 ½ lengths and the Gr. 2 Pan American on turf at Gulfstream. 

Sent to Churchill Downs, Therapist was a wide eighth in the Gr. 2 Louisville Stakes. At Ellis Park, he was second by a head in a $160,000 stakes. 

In the $600,000 United Nations at Monmouth Park, July 22, Therapist won his first Gr. 1, scoring by a length and a half in the mile-and-three-eighths stakes under Javier Castellano. In his last start, Therapist finished eighth in the mile-and-a-half Kentucky Downs Turf Cup. Dubb can live with that. Therapist’s U.N. score earned $360,000—more than seven times what Dubb paid to claim him.

 Of course, all his claims weren’t as successful. 

At Anna House and Faith’s House, all the children are given the tools to be successful. “We give them confidence to compete,” Dubb said.

Dubb conceived the idea of Anna House after Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey told him that backstretch workers’ kids were sleeping in cars. “It just wasn’t right,” Dubb said. “We recognized the need for daycare. I worked with NYRA to find a location. It took about 18 months. We got Anna House built in seven weeks.”

More than 1,000 kids have passed through Anna House, which offers 365-daycare from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. There are programs for infants from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. and a school-age program from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Parents of the families are asked to make a “very small donation,” Joanne Adams, the Belmont Child Care Association executive director, said. “We write grants to assist us, and corporations help us.” 

 Asked of Dubb’s ongoing contributions to both Anna House and Faith’s House, Adams said, “It’s hard to imagine any of this without Michael.”

She continued, “He has a big heart. He cares about the people around him. He has shared his early life and what he did and how he worked hard to get where he is. He’s just a very caring person, exceedingly bright. He understands business, and he understands people. He’s happy when the people around him are happy.”

Dubb says of both daycare centers: “They’ve exceeded my wildest dreams, to see how incredibly happy the children are.”

Following in Their Footsteps: Lessons in Business & Training Passed Between Generations

The story of horse racing is one of families. Usually, the conversations focus on the equine kind, sires and dams, and what the generations listed in each horse’s pedigrees bring to the athletes at the center of the sport. The human side of racing too features the age-old tale of family legacies as knowledge and experience gained by one inspires the next to join the fray. 

Whether the name is Hirsch or Veitch, Bryant or Casse or Mandella, the training side of the sport has its share of families passing both knowledge and experience down to the next generation. Summers spent mucking stalls and caring for horses allow parents to share hard-earned expertise with their children, and, in turn, move them to follow in their footsteps. Their journeys to striking out on their own may mirror the ones the previous generation undertook, but the challenges that each face are ones that reflect the changing times within the sport.

The Mandellas 

As the son of a blacksmith, Hall of Fame trainer Richard Mandella grew up with horses, seemingly destined to make his life about their care and training. He assisted his father Gene on their California ranch and learned to break and ride horses from an early age. Dreams of being a jockey turned into time in the saddle as an exercise rider and then years in the barn as a trainer, finding success with horses like Dare and Go, Kotashaan, Omaha Beach, and Beholder. When it came to his two children following in his footsteps, the California-based Mandella, who has been training for nearly five decades, found son Gary eager to join the family business, but the fatherly side of the Hall of Famer tried to dissuade his son from going that route. 

“We were walking out to the parking lot one day, and I asked him, ‘What are you going to do when you finish school?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to do what you do, Dad,’” Mandella shared. “I couldn't chase him away. I wanted him to get a real job. He didn't like the idea and worked for me.”

Gary, on the other hand, followed through with his father’s request that he go to college and even tried broadcasting for a time. “I feel very fortunate that people tried to open my eyes to remind me what else was out there, that I could look into something else and try this, try that,” the younger Mandella reflected. “But I knew before I turned 16, that it was going to be hard to get away from [training].” 

His foresight about that career choice came from years growing up with horses right outside his window. The family had a small farm where his dad would send horses for some downtime, meaning that the younger Mandellas were working with and caring for these athletes from their earliest years. “I woke up, and every window that I looked out of my bedroom, I saw horses,” he remembered. “Just helping take care of them there and having the opportunity to be around them all the time made [me] want to be a part of that.”

Those experiences working with his dad and his horses on their family property as well as on the racetrack brought Gary Mandella the background he would need when he decided that a trainer’s life was for him. “My father’s always been more of a lead by example than make a big speech kind,” the younger trainer observed. “He showed me, expected me to pay attention, and was always clear about what the priorities should be.” 

The Bryants

George Bryant started his career in the saddle, riding Quarter Horses for more than a decade, but, when age spelled the end of that career, he parlayed his lifetime with horses into training. Based in Texas, he worked first with Quarter Qorses and later Thoroughbreds, retiring in 2021 as son George Allan Bryant faced a fight for his life. 

Diagnosed with stage four oral cancer, the younger Bryant battled through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, coming out of the experience determined to follow through with his goal of becoming a trainer like his father. He had delayed starting his career until the elder Bryant stepped away, instead working as a racing manager for HDT Allied Management, hosting the Horse Racing Destination podcast, and serving as a member of the Texas Thoroughbred Association.

His decision to open his public stable and start his training career was a long overdue one in the eyes of the elder Bryant: “He’s been ready for quite a while now, [but] it was up to him to make the decision. He really didn’t want to go into training until after I retired.” 

“I didn’t want to compete with him,” George Allan Bryant shared about his decision to defer his training career. Though he did not start his own stable until 2022, the younger man watched and learned from his father, always accompanying the elder Bryant to the barn and riding horses at an early age. This hands-on education prepared the younger Bryant so well that he passed his trainer’s license test on the first try, and then got on social media to share that he was ready to open his stable. He got his first client, Mike Powers, not too long after that. 

Now, his barn at Sam Houston Race Park in Houston counts 20 horses, with the elder Bryant by his son’s side as his assistant, building on the determination that got him through his fight with cancer and pushing him forward. 

The Casses

Mark Casse’s own roots in racing come from his father Norman, one of the founders of the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company whose Cardinal Hill Farm in Marion County, Florida, gave Mark hands-on time with horses from his earliest years. As a 12-year-old boy, the future Hall of Famer accompanied his father to the 1973 Kentucky Derby and decided to become a trainer after watching Secretariat’s record-breaking performance. It was during those formative years that he learned what it took to become a trainer.

“You learn from many places. I was running my dad’s training barn when I was 15,” Casse recalled. “I learned from grooms, from hot walkers, from exercise riders. You learn because you love it.”

In 1979, six years after that fateful encounter with Secretariat, Casse got his first win at Keeneland in Lexington, Kentucky, and his first stakes win at Sportsman’s Park near Chicago at just 18 years old; but success at the highest level was still to come. In the late 1990s, he moved his base to Woodbine in Toronto, Ontario, and added racing north of the border to his resume. In the meantime, his oldest son Norm was growing up surrounded by family in the sport, with both of his grandfathers and then his father all involved. But his love came more from his childhood in Louisville, Kentucky, growing up with all things Derby. 

“I just fell in love with horse racing just because I was here and how much the Derby meant to the community,” Casse shared. Much like his dad, Mark’s encounter with Secretariat, Smarty Jones’s Triple Crown run in 2004 spurred the younger Casse’s desire to become part of the sport: “There was just something about that horse in particular that just really excited me, and it was [then] that I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”  

The younger Casse was in his early 20s when Smarty Jones came into his life, playing baseball at Bellarmine University with an eye on what was next: “I figured that I wasn’t going to be good enough to be professional by any means, but I always thought maybe I would be a coach.” After graduating from Bellarmine, Norm joined his dad’s stable in 2006, getting an in-depth education about training horses after years where his focus had been outside of racing. 

“I was behind the eight ball when I first started,” Norm observed. “The intention was always going out on my own, but I knew it was going to take at least 10–12 years before I was going to be comfortable and ready.” Before he went out on his own in 2018, the younger trainer managed strings at American racetracks like Saratoga and Keeneland while the elder Casse focused on his Canadian stable—experience that mitigated the growing pains other trainers face when starting their own stables. 

With his first Kentucky Oaks starter, Southlawn in 2023, Norm Casse continues to build on the lessons learned working with his Hall of Fame father and finding success in his own program with horses like Pretty Birdie and Rhyme Schemes in his barn.   

The Challenges of the Business and Sport

For the Mandellas in California, the challenges are two-fold. A declining population of horses and the rising costs of maintaining a stable make that circuit a tough place to race. “There’s just [not] near the number of stables here as there used to be,” the elder Mandella observed. He let Gary know that the option to leave California and train elsewhere was there, but “[Gary] decided to stay put.” 

According to the younger Mandella, the purse money that tracks in California have to offer has not kept pace with what tracks backed by casinos have to offer. Because of that, plus the higher cost of living in the state, the circuit lacks a middle. The state’s racing scene is still strong at the top, as evidenced by the success of West Coast horses coming east, but the inflated prices of real estate and feed make it harder to maintain a barn of allowance and claiming horses. 

The younger Mandella has his own stable but shares a barn with his father as well. The two work together, as the Hall of Famer has scaled back his operation, happy to have his son on hand to help guide both stables through the implementation of HISA (Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority) regulations and the growing dependence on technology. “I’m lucky I have had this barn for 49 years, and I’ve got some great people that work for me,” the elder Mandella shared. “Having him along with it makes it possible for me to get through all of this new stuff.” 

Technology makes it easier to communicate with owners and to work with larger ownership groups like My Racehorse, which the Mandella barn has found success with; but it also opens up another set of challenges for the sport. As Mark Casse pointed out, social media has made sharing information, like win percentages, easier, which can be a double-edged sword. 

“Everybody wants you to win at a high percentage, and that’s a challenge; and then any little move, any little thing that goes wrong or right shows up on social media, which is tough,” he observed. 

Additionally, social media has also led to continued scrutiny from many different directions, especially in light of the recent charges against Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis. “It’s the reason why I have pushed so hard for HISA,” Casse shared. “I want my kids who choose to make this their business to be able to do the right thing and to be on a level playing field.” 

For the father-son Bryant team, the biggest difference between starting in the 1980s and in the 2020s is the cost of labor, supplies, and the horses themselves. “It’s gotten to be pretty expensive,” the elder Bryant observed. “When I started, a bale of hay was probably $1.50, and now it’s $20.”

To succeed, “you got to be pretty business smart, and you have to have owners that pay you good,” he said, a sentiment echoed by Gary Mandella. 

“This is one of the few businesses where you post bills for services rendered as opposed to pre-billing,” the trainer observed. “When you’re operating with a high overhead, it can be stressful. You have to manage that stress so that you’re just taking the horses in consideration as individuals.” 

Balancing the needs of the horses with the needs of the business remains a vital part of the job of horse trainer. While each considers what their horses need, they also need to look beyond the day-to-day care and maintenance to the evolving issues of bringing both new owners and new horses to their barns.

The Search for the Next Big Thing 

High up on the list of challenges for trainers is bringing in both new owners and new horses to their barns. The advent of social media as well as the rise of partnerships and microshare syndicates means that the way that the sport conducts business has changed and the men and women who make their living in it must adapt as well. While the opportunities to work as a private trainer for one or two owners may be fewer, these father-son tandems must navigate the continuing evolution in both recruiting owners and finding horses to train. 

For George Allan Bryant, social media has allowed him to reach potential owners in ways that his father could not in earlier decades and has enabled his nascent barn to grow. “I can advertise my horses and business much easier,” the younger Bryant shared. 

Hall of Famer Mark Casse has also seen a change in this era of instantaneous communication. Over his 40-year career, he primarily relied on phone calls to keep his clients informed, yet the 21st century has taken the phone to a new level. “The way we communicate now is much different. Now I would say that 95% of owners get updates when their horses work or when they run,” he observed. “I get a lot of texts and emails and those kinds of things. I still have lots of phone calls, but it has definitely changed.”

Alongside the changes in how owners access information about their horses and potential trainers, the rise of syndicates like MyRacehorse and Commonwealth, both of whom boast Kentucky Derby winners in Authentic and Mage, has changed the sport, opening up opportunities for more people to get involved in owning horses, but also helping to mitigate the rising costs of owning and training horses. That also leaves racing with two distinct groups calling the shots.  

“I feel like the game right now is moving toward you can either afford to have all of your horses yourself and call all of your own shots, or you need to be a part of a big partnership where there’s truly no stress; you bought your piece, and everybody else handles everything,” Gary Mandella shared. “They tell you where to be, where to show up, and you can either make it or not. It’s all handled.”

Though such new approaches to ownership open the sport up to people who might not have been able to participate otherwise, it does lead to one trend that has troubled the sport over the last three decades as the majority of the sport’s highest earners tend to be in the barns of only a few. 

As the younger Mandella pointed out, “Part of the selling point of these big syndicates is you can’t get in with Bob Baffert if you buy a horse yourself for $20,000 as a yearling; but if you spend $20,000 on share of more expensive horses, then you get access to Baffert or Brad Cox or Todd Pletcher. And again, now too many of the horses are in the hands of too few, and that hurts.” 

For the elder Casse, these ownership groups bring a definite upside to the sport: “It would be my opinion that syndicates have introduced many people to our sport. As things go on, some of them feel the need to go ahead and branch out and do a little bit more on their own. I think they’re great for our sport. 

“There’s so much to learn about our sport, and if you try to get into it on your own, it’s very difficult. But those syndicates are good for learning.” 

In the case of the elder Mandella, working with MyRacehorse has streamlined his responsibilities, allowing him to step away from attending sales and focus more on selecting the horses he will train. “The owners all tend to have bloodstock agents and managers now,” Mandella shared. “I try to not interfere with that and just hope they send me some horses.” 

Syndicates like MyRacehorse will bring Mandella and other trainers out to their bases in areas like Aiken, South Carolina, and allow each to select the horses they would like to train. In the case of the younger Bryant, he even started his own syndicate, Passion Racing, to offer potential owners the chance to invest in horses he trains. He also works with his owners like Adam Blick of Blick Racing, attending sales and offering his feedback on potential runners. 

For trainer Norm Casse, his focus is on the two types of clients he works with, those who buy from the sales and those who claim horses. When it comes to buying horses, “I have professionals that represent me at the sales to find new horses, and I trust their opinions.” On the other hand, he is more involved with the selection of the horses he claims. “I have certain types of horses that I like, and looking at past performances, I can decide which horses would be successful in our program,” he shared. “I like claiming horses using common sense, and it’s really as simple as that.” 

When it comes to adding clients and horses to their barns, the elder Casse has not seen as much of a change in recent years. Rather than actively recruiting, “I think most trainers just let the results speak for themselves and hope that owners will come,” he said. “There’s so much more information out there for people to gather, but you still get a lot of recommendations from other owners.”

Instead, he makes the best of the sales, working with clients like Charlotte Weber of Live Oak Stud to pick out potential racers. “I like it because if I don’t do a good job, get good horses, the only one to answer to or be upset with is myself,” the long-time conditioner shared. “I enjoy picking out horses, and I have a real good memory of the horses I’ve trained; and I try to duplicate that.” 

What the current trends in ownership and horse selection create is a challenging environment for the sport as a whole, where success at the top levels mirrors what’s happening in other sports. As the younger Mandella observes, “One  of the great selling points of horse racing is that it is truly the only major sport where you can try to win a championship without spending the most money. There’s such a strong concept in baseball, basketball, football and hockey, where somebody comes in and either increases their budget or buys a team and changes the concept.” 

“None of these sports have a story like California Chrome or Real Quiet or Sunday Silence—horses that were bought for so little money and were able to take down horses that were seven figures and owned by some of the richest people in the world. Where else can you partake in that?”

Echoing his son’s thoughts, Richard Mandella sees a need for racing to restore a balance between the business and the sport: “that part needs to be addressed and always paid attention to so that we don’t get too far to the business side and get too cold about it. This is meant to be an escape for people in real life working in offices, running businesses, and having all of those headaches. Racing is supposed to be a way to get your mind on something else and have some fun.” 

“The better we can make the sport look, the more chance we’re going to get people to come here,” he observed. 

The evolution of the sport in the era of social media and syndication add new demands to their jobs, but these father-son tandems remain committed to the sport they have loved from their earliest days. Though the pressures of training these equine athletes and maintaining the business side of the game may test these conditioners, they are all open to the idea of their own children deciding to join their ranks. 

Advice for the the next generation

George Allan Bryant’s advice is to stay on top of the bills and expenses that come with caring for these athletes and maintaining the communication necessary to work with the owners. “You’ve got to take care of your bills,” he observed. “But this is also a people business as much as it is a horse business. Your phone is always on.” 

Norm Casse too echoed that aspect of the job: “The main thing I learned is how to deal with clients and owners. I never have a problem communicating with the owner because my whole life, I’ve been listening to somebody do it.” With apps like The Racing Manager, Casse and other trainers can quickly communicate with everyone associated with a horse, another avenue for keeping their clients in the know as their horses develop and progress. 

For Mandella, the key to bringing in a new generation to the training business would be to show his son the ropes much as his father did. “I would warn him that this is a business that has economic risks to jump into for sure,” he said. “But also, I would give him as much support as I possibly could.” 

At the center of all six trainers’ time on the track are the equine athletes that make the demanding schedules and daily stresses worthwhile. For all three families, the focus remains on the horses and their care and development, all seeking not just success on the racetrack but the connection with the animals in their care.

“You’ve got to really know your horses and pay attention to all of the little things,” George Bryant shared. “Take excellent care of your horses. The better care you take of them, the healthier they’ll be and the faster they’ll run for you.” 

Alan Balch - Federalism Redux

As if we in American racing weren’t already facing serious threats to our very existence as a major sport, and an exceptionally elaborate interdependent business, now we’re also an example of the present national political dysfunction and irrationality. Just one more sharp dagger.

Over a half-century ago, I spent a previous lifetime in academia—studying government and political philosophy, with an emphasis on American political enterprise and evolution. When I joined Santa Anita, I never thought that I would one day witness at the racetrack the fundamental contradictions of the American founding! 

But here we are, courtesy of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA). As you are probably aware, this addition of national government oversight to Thoroughbred racing, which had previously been the province of state-by-state regulation, came by way of its sudden inclusion in a must-pass federal budget bill in the waning days of the Trump presidency. Courtesy of Republican Party Leader Senator McConnell, of Kentucky—whose patrons The Jockey Club and Churchill Downs advocated for it.

There is little doubt that the enabling legislation wouldn’t have been adopted had it been considered on its own merits, absent the cover of the required federal budget.

In any event, the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted at the founding, reads in whole, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Since racing had always been regulated by the individual states where it had been held (for nearly 100 years, or even more in some states), its sudden impending regulation by the federal government was bound to raise serious issues of “federalism.”

Way back when American schools required Civics and American Government to be taught—rigorously—we all were expected to learn the basic founding stories: about the original thirteen colonies of Great Britain, the American Revolution, and the Articles of Confederation which preceded the Constitution. Suffice it to say that the age-old tensions between the prerogatives and responsibilities of the individual state governments and those of the national (“federal”) government underpin all of American politics.

Federalism, our system of government whereby the same geographic territory is under the jurisdiction of multiple layers of authority, is at once the genius of our American democratic republic and its potential debilitating weakness. Such a structure requires cooperation—and repeated compromise. It’s been nearly 250 years since our Declaration of Independence. To this day, our founding tensions underlie virtually all our politics and governments . . . from local school boards to town and city councils, to counties, states, and the federal government.  

So, is it any wonder that when consensus in our complex, diverse nation is still so difficult to achieve on fundamental issues of human rights, race and voting procedures, our own (trivial?) questions of how horse racing is to be governed hardly have merited a glance?

Irony has heaped upon irony in racing’s current regulatory quagmire. The contemporary political party that seems to believe in the supremacy of states’ prerogatives as to critical issues of voting and personal behavior—the opposite one from the party that used that same banner to fuel the secession of Southern states igniting the Civil War in 1860—has abandoned it when it comes to racing oversight! Its leadership believes the heavy hand of the federal government is too weighty for issues of life, death and voting, but necessary to wield on regulating racing.

Thus far, trying to use federal law to serve the cause of regulatory uniformity nationwide has resulted in the opposite, at great expense, monetary and otherwise. The “otherwise” may well include sacrificing basic tenets of due process of law, such as the presumption of innocence for those accused of misbehavior.

And all of this was so unnecessary. The Jockey Club and the other prime movers of HISA should have simply engaged in good faith at the outset with the Association of Racing Commissioners International (ARCI). Its model rules have been developed over decades of interfacing with state racing boards and the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, which includes trainer and owner representation. With that approach, the issues now plaguing all of us would be much diminished, if they still existed at all. Bottom line, nobody in the sport wants cheaters. But a relatively few in the sport, it would seem, do still want to decide for and dictate to all the rest of us. Does The Jockey Club actually want a more rapidly shrinking sport? It’s entirely possible, perhaps probable, with all the foreseeable angst. 

HISA leadership professes to be open, transparent and willing to consider improvements. If that is so, why won’t it immediately understand the serious threat of “provisional suspensions” to every trainer and owner, and the near-total lack of transparency and timely response when it comes to cases of obvious environmental contamination? That very concept of “provisional” suspension, which came from international non-racing equestrian sport regulation, is indicative of a blindness to the realities of racing which would have never occurred were the ARCI model rules adopted.

Instead of using its expensive public relations machine to continue sending repeated self-serving, congratulatory messages to a skeptical community, HISA should tell all the rest of us how we can go about expeditiously amending its rules to provide for practical, fair and truly transparent governance.

Publius (the pseudonym for James Madison in Federalist Paper #47) wrote this in 1788: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” 

As it stands now, HISA’s authority, rule-making, disciplinary practices and governance are perilously close to just that destructive.

WIth absent judicial intervention, only HISA itself can open the door to necessary reform—before it’s too late.

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Bill Parcells - August Dawn Farm (Maple Leaf Mel)

The juiciest thrill for a Thoroughbred owner is having an undefeated young horse. You don’t know, the trainer doesn’t know, and nobody on the planet knows when that undefeated horse will stop winning as he or she climbs up in competition.

NFL Hall of Fame former New York Giants Coach Bill Parcells, who races as August Dawn Farm, knows about thrills, having won the Giants’ first two of four Super Bowl victories.

Since becoming a Thoroughbred owner in 2011, he’s had 59 victories from 353 starts and more than $4.5 million in earnings.

But he’s never had a Grade 2 victory, let alone a Grade 1, and now his undefeated New York-bred filly Maple Leaf Mel is poised to add that Grade 1 score to her resume in the Grade 1 Test Stakes at Saratoga August 5th. 

Handy victories in the Grade 3 Miss Preakness at Pimlico and the Grade 3 Victory Ride at Belmont Park made the New York-bred five-for-five. She’s won all five wire-to-wire.

Growing up in New Jersey, Parcells used to go to Monmouth Park with his father. Showing a tender side he might not have displayed on the Giants’ sidelines, Parcells named the filly for her young trainer, 39-year-old Melanie Giddings, who survived ovarian and endocervical cancer in 2020 and went on her own this spring after serving as an assistant for Jeremiah Englehart. Maple Leaf Mel’s 2 ½ length victory in the Victory Ride was the first with Giddings listed as her trainer.

Parcells bought her for $150,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Mid-Atlantic Two-Year-Olds in Training Sale. She is a daughter of Cross Traffic out of City Gift by City Place.

“When Bill said he was going to name her for me, I kind of thought he wasn’t serious,” Giddings said. “When it happened, it was an honor, when a guy like that names a horse for you. He loves Saratoga. He really does love the New York-bred program.”

He’ll love it even more if Maple Leaf Mel keeps winning open-company stakes. “She’s great,” Giddings said. “She’s a pleasure to be around. She does everything perfect. You can’t ask for any more. Work her fast; work her slow; work her behind horses. You wish you can find more like her.”

Giddings currently has eight horses in her barn. “When you don’t have connections, it’s a tough go,” she said. “You have to find ways to get horses.”

Parcells could use Maple Leaf Mel’s earnings to remedy that. With just under $400,000 in earnings, she is already Parcells’ fifth highest-earning horse behind Saratoga Snacks ($523,600), Play Action Pass ($480,935), Hit It Once More ($390,102) and Three Technique ($366,615). Saratoga Snacks won the 2013 Empire Classic for trainer Gary Sciacca. 

Another Parcells runner, Forty Under, won the 2018 Grade 3 Pilgrim Stakes. “He’s a pleasure to train for,” Giddings said. “He likes to joke around. At the end of the day, he says, `Do whatever you like.’ He’s up at 5 a.m. every day. He goes to the gym. He goes to the barn every morning. He tells me right now I’m more popular than Taylor Swift. I said, if that’s the case, Belmont would have been packed.”

Belmont hasn’t been packed too many times. And Parcells was one of the no-shows for Maple Leaf Mel’s last glittering performance. “He’s a little superstitious,” Giddings said. “He hasn’t been there recently for her races. He was feeling a little nervous like the rest of us. He stayed here in Saratoga and watched her.”

She was sensational. “Her last race was her toughest field,” Giddings said. “It seems like she’s getting better. When Joel (Rosario) asked her, she responded. Then he wrapped up on her.”

After the race, Rosario said, “She’s very nice. She goes out there and just does her job. She was very relaxed and was never worried about someone challenging her because she was moving so well. She goes out there and shows her speed and says, `come and beat me.’”

Nobody has. And most young horses improve in their first few starts. “You hope so,” Giddings said. “You keep them happy. A happy horse runs well. I’ve done this so long for a lot of people, I feel like it’s second nature.”

Beating cancer saved and changed her life. “When you go through that kind of sickness, you may not wake up in the morning,” she said. “I’m more easy going. I want to live a life worth living.”

She’s already jump-started her training career with Maple Leaf Mel. “I didn’t really set any goals,” she said. “I’d be super happy if I can say I won a race at Saratoga. If the Test was that race, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Jon Ebbert (Arcangelo)

Article by Bill Heller

Arcangelo showed Jon Ebbert life can begin just before turning 40 years old. Three days before his 40th birthday, Ebbert was standing in the Belmont Park winner’s circle after Arcangelo, his $35,000 yearling purchase, won the Belmont Stakes by a length and a half, making his trainer, Jena Antonucci, the first woman to win a Triple Crown race.

That wasn’t the only history Arcangelo made. He gave his Hall of Fame jockey Javier Castellano, who contributed a brilliant ride, his first victory in the Belmont Stakes after 14 misses. Just five weeks earlier, Castellano ended his zero-for-15 schneid in the Kentucky Derby with Mage. In between, Hall of Famer John Velazquez won his first Preakness Stakes with National Treasure after a dozen Preakness losses.

Dabbling with Hall of Famers and winning the final leg of the Triple Crown? Really?

Ebbert, who works in real estate in Pennsylvania and races as Blue Rose Farm, was introduced to racing at the age of six by his grandmother. He and his family were picking her up to go out for dinner on the first Saturday in May and she told them she couldn’t go until she saw how her horse in the 1988 Kentucky Derby fared. Two years later, Ebbert told his parents he wanted to begin riding lessons, and the rest is history, a very slow-developing history.

Ebbert displayed remarkable patience and persistence as an owner with little success over the past 15 years. The first horse he bought, Daydreamin Boy, cost $3,700 and went zero-for-14 for him.

There were no real highlights. Before Arcangelo made his career debut last December, Ebbert was two-for-37 with earnings of $86,950 racing under his name. Racing under Blue Rose Farm, he’d been zero-for-two with earnings of $1,000.

One horse and one trainer changed all that.

Ebbert met Antonucci by chance the day before the 2021 Keeneland September Yearling Sale. He told Dave Grening of the Daily Racing Form in his June 9th story that he went to the sale looking to buy a son of Classic Empire who could take him to the 2024 Breeders’ Cup. Ebbert found a son of Classic Empire, Classic Bourbon, and purchased him for $100,000. Through June 2023, Classic Bourbon is zero-for-nine with earnings of $6,170. He is also trained by Antonucci.

Fortunately for Ebbert, another yearling caught his eye, one by Arrogate out of the Tapit mare Modeling. Ebbert bought him for $35,000.

Antonucci started Classic Bourbon twice as a two-year-old on August 27th and September 18th. 

She brought Arcangelo along a bit more slowly at Gulfstream Park. He finished second in his debut December 17th, then fourth on January 14th with Jose Ortiz aboard both times. On March 18th, with Castellano in the saddle for the first time, Arcangelo won by 3 ½ lengths.

Shipped to Belmont Park, Ebbert and Antonucci asked Arcangelo to take a giant step up in the Grade 2 Peter Pan Stakes, the traditional prep for the Belmont Stakes, May 13th. Arcangelo gamely edged Bishops Bay by a head after a protracted head-to-head stretch battle.

That presented Ebbert with a crucial decision. He had not kept Arcangelo eligible for the Triple Crown, but he could supplement him to the Belmont Stakes for $50,000, $15,000 more than he had paid to buy him.

Ebbert didn’t blink, putting up the $50,000 for a chance to win the final leg of the Triple Crown. “He made the money; we’re going to go for it; we’ve got faith in the horse,” Ebbert told Grening.

The faith was justified. Castellano’s flawless ride gave Ebbert his greatest victory. Arcangelo is now a key contender in the widest-open three-year-old division in many years with races such as the Grade 1 Travers Stakes on the horizon. 

His grandmother would have been very proud. 

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Chase Chamberlin, Commonwealth Racing (Mage)

Article by Bill Heller

When Chase Chamberlin, a successful entrepreneur who partnered with Brian Doxtator to create the very successful, Kentucky Derby-winning Commonwealth Racing, was in the second grade in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he said he wanted to be an entrepreneur. “My uncle, John Handelsman, was an entrepreneur,” Chamberlin said. “He had a very successful leasing company.” 

Don’t read too much into it. The year before, Chamberlin wrote down orthopedic surgeon. “Another uncle was one,” he said.

In the third grade, he wanted to be a defense attorney. “I watched way too much TV,” he said.

He didn’t know then, but an even earlier passion, riding and loving horses, would ultimately land him, Doxtator and maybe 100 or more of the 382 micro-share Commonwealth partners into the Kentucky Derby winner’s circle when Mage won the 2023 Kentucky Derby. “It was very hard to process,” Chamberlin said. “It was so overwhelming. It was an out-of-body experience, completely surreal.”

But not his first. In 2022, Commonwealth’s first horse it offered on its app, Country Grammer, finished second by a half-length to Emblem Road in the $20 million Grade 1 Saudi Cup. He then won the $12 million Dubai World Cup by 1 ¾ lengths over Hot Rod Charlie. He finished second in the Saudi Cup again this year  by three-quarters of a length. Though he was seventh in the Dubai World Cup and fourth in the Grade 1 Gold Cup in his two most recent starts, he’s banked nearly $15 million. “When Country Grammer won the Dubai World Cup, I had $120 in my personal checking account,” Chamberlin said. “He’s a very special horse, an incredibly special horse.”

So was his first Thoroughbred, Katie. Chamberlin was 4 when he climbed aboard her. “She stopped to graze and I slipped down her neck and landed on my feet,” he said. “I was always fearless. I jumped right back up there. The trainer, Ken, said, `I think this is going to stick.’”

Did it ever. He became a two-time national champion in saddle seat riding, a style of English riding designed to show off the high action of various horse breeds which is prevalent in the United States, Canada and South Africa. “I’ve trained national champions, too,” Chamberlin said. “I’ve been very fortunate. It is my greatest love. I tried to quit a couple of times and I’ve been unsuccessful.”

Chamberlin, whose lone sibling Ashley is eight years older, learned to work hard from his parents. “My dad was in a paper mill; my mom owned a hair salon,” he said. “I grew up with extraordinary, hard-working Midwesterners. My mom, a type `A’, was always pushing us to try new things. I was always around adults.”

Ashley and Doxtator were very good friends. Doxtator kind of knew Chamberlin.

Both graduated from Western Michigan, Doxtator in 2004 and Chamberlin in 2012. “I had several show horses when I was choosing a college,” Chamberlin said. “My parents said `You can go to a school in-state and keep the horses or out-of-state and we’ll sell the horses.’” 

No brainer. Western Michigan is in Kalamazoo. “Western had a top sales program, out-competing the Ivy League,” he said. “It was an easy decision.”

In college, Chamberlin was the captain of Western Michigan Broncos’ equestrian team. Out of college, Chamberlin helped turn around a home health care company, then did consulting, showing and selling horses for a year before returning to business. He spent four years working in sales and video strategy for one of the world’s largest digital video studios, Epipheo.

A chance meeting with Doxtator in a Barnes and Noble store changed his career and his life. “He hadn’t seen me since I was a little boy,” Chamberlin said. “He sent me a message: `I’ve got an idea I think you will love.’”

Doxtator started his business career working as an analyst in mergers and acquisitions for Legg Mason, an investment banking firm in Baltimore. He then moved to New York to work in corporate group strategy for AIC, a tech and media holding company. Next up was a move cross country to San Francisco, where he joined a new company, Playhaven, a marketing platform for mobile app developers. “We grew Playhaven from five people and zero revenue to 200 employees and $50 million annual revenue,” Doxtator said in the Western Michigan alumni magazine. When Playhaven got sold, Doxtator helped his wife, Christy, launch a bridal business, LOHO Bride.

Then Doxtator came up with an idea. While exploring financial technology startups, he became intrigued with new regulations allowing apps to sell shares in assets. He thought that could be applied to sports, particularly horse racing. And he knew just who to call to find a partner.

In January, 2019, they launched Commonwealth, which allows investors to buy horses for as little as $50. Commonwealth is about to launch a similar platform for golf fans.

Chamberlin and Doxtator didn’t wait long to make a huge connection with WinStar Farm. Elliott Walden, president and CEO of WinStar, said on Commonwealth’s website “We are excited to enter this partnership. We have seen the micro-share space grow, and believe that offering the horses that WinStar Farm races to the public will bring excitement and energy to the sport.”

You think? Country Grammer and Mage!

At the 2019 Saratoga meet, Chamberlin had the good fortune of being introduced to Ramiro Restrepo. “We became friends,” Chamberlin said. “We talked about connections.”

In 2022, Chamberlin got a call from Restrepo, who had teamed with trainer Gustavo Delgado Sr. to purchase Mage for $290,000 – more than they had budgeted – at the Fasig-Tipton Mid-Atlantic Two-Year-Olds-in-Training Sale. “He said, `I’ve got this nice Good Magic colt. We’re looking for somebody to take 25 percent,’” Chamberlin said.

Chamberlin watched the video of Mage’s breeze and gallop-out. “I loved them, but I wanted to see the horse in person,” he said. “I see our horses in the flesh before we buy them. I want to have convictions on every horse we offer.”

Chamberlin went to see Mage at the Lexington Thoroughbred Training Center and decided instantly: “The moment I saw him, I said, `Done, we’ll take him!’ He’s built like a bull.”

Commonwealth offered shares of its 25 percent interest in Mage to the public on its app, and 382 people bought in for as little as $50. “It was an incredible array of people,” Chamberlin said. “Professionals, doctors, factory workers, young tech guys.”

Now all of them have a memory of a lifetime: the Kentucky Derby. “I was more emotional when I saw the reactions of my partners,” Chamberlin said. “This is what we give to people. What good is a great horse like Mage if you don’t share him with others? Sharing it with other people made it special for me.”

Actually, horses have been special to him since he was four, 29 years ago. “Horses have been great to me,” Chamberlin said. “They are my greatest passion. It’s absolutely what I love. I hope I get to do horses until the day I die.” 

George Weaver - Champagne still flowing!

Article by Bill Heller

Eight years removed from his first unsuccessful starter at Royal Ascot, trainer George Weaver was already a winner when his two-year-old filly Crimson Advocate stepped onto the track to contest the Gp. 2 Queen Mary Stakes June 21. That’s because his love, his partner and his best friend, his wife Cindy Hutter, was able to accompany him and their 20-year-old son Ben to England nearly one year after her gruesome injury on the Oklahoma Training Track at Saratoga Race Course. A horse she was galloping suffered an apparent heart attack and collapsed on her, causing severe brain damage and multiple injuries—changing their lives forever.

Imagine their joy when a photo finish showed that Crimson Advocate and Hall of Fame jockey John Velazquez, had won the Queen Mary Stakes by a fraction of a nose, making Weaver just the third American trainer to capture a race at England’s most prestigious course, in a field of 26. “It was very, very emotional for us,” Weaver said. “ It was kind of miraculous—a beautiful experience much more than winning a race at Ascot. It was kind of spiritual.”

Cindy said after the race, “It was kind of like a dream come true.”

It happened 12 days short of one year after the nightmare at Saratoga.

Weaver was walking back to the barn with another horse when Cindy went down. “By the time I got there, the ambulance was there,” he said. “She was unconscious. She was bleeding. It was a bizarre day. It was a very scary day. It was a very stressful time. We didn’t know if she was going to regain consciousness. We didn’t know what the future would hold.”

Cindy had suffered broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a lung injury besides bleeding on the brain. Though seemingly unconscious, she was able to give a thumbs-up sign after hearing a voice command from a doctor. There was reason for hope.

Hope can go a long way. No one envisioned Weaver and Cindy standing in the winner’s circle at Royal Ascot less than a year later. “We’ve been doing this our whole lives,” Weaver said. “It was an exciting day for us.”

Weaver, 53, was born and raised in Louisville and knew at a very young age that his life would involve Thoroughbreds. He thanks his father, Bill, for that. “My dad took me to the track and told me how to read the Form since I was very little—less than a year old. It was exposed to me early on, and it stuck with me.”

His brother, Scott, went to the track with him, but after working briefly with horses, he turned to business and works for a computer company. 

Weaver has never left the business. “I was never really in doubt about what I wanted to do,” he said.

He worked on a farm briefly for Kenny Burkhart but didn’t take long to know he wanted to work at the track. While still in high school, he began walking hots for trainer John Hennig in the summer. “I was 17,” Weaver said. “I told him I didn’t want to be a hotwalker. I wanted to learn. He took me to Philadelphia Park. He taught me how to be a better hotwalker, how to groom and horsemanship.”

When Hennig left to work for Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas at a training center in California, Weaver was given a choice in 1991: go to California and work for Hennig or travel to New York to work for Lukas’ New York operation under Jeff Lukas and Hall of Famer Todd Pletcher. 

“Working for Wayne, he had some very, very nice horses,” Weaver said. “It was a source of pride to come out of that program, learning to train horses. It’s a lot of trial and error. That was my schooling as opposed to college. I went to the University of Wayne Lukas.”

Lukas remembers both Weaver and Cindy fondly: “The two of them were both working for me at the same time. It was a treat to have them in the shed row. Both excellent horse people. I never doubted for a second they’d be successful. He’s an articulate, good horseman. I’m very proud of him. I saw him on TV at Ascot. It was a treat to see him over there. If George doesn’t do anything else, he married smart.” 

  Cindy, a native of Romansville, Pennsylvania, began riding at an early age and began working for Bruce Miller when she was 16. She galloped horses at Delaware Park and, in her early twenties, began working for Lukas in New York.

It was not love at first sight. They knew each other for years before they began dating. They’ve been together ever since. His respect for her horsemanship is considerable: “She could be on her own… attention to detail…perfectionist. Over the years, she could help a horse who was nervous or a head case. She was always our go-to girl. She’d fix them. I can’t tell you how. She has a great instinct for a horse. She’s a great rider. She’s one of a kind. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone like her.”

When they learned Cindy was pregnant, they decided to go on their own in 2002. “It was time to make a go for it,” Weaver said. “It was time for me to give it a go: come together as a family and see how it went. Luckily, we’ve had a lot of success over the years. She managed the barn so I could focus on our clients. We’ve always worked well together and done well.”

Always? A husband and wife together 24/7? “I won’t lie to you; she has strong opinions,” Weaver said. “Obviously, you have clashes. But we have a mutual respect. It starts with that. We both have the same philosophy: keeping the horses happy.”

Cindy agreed: “We keep horses happy. We do little things like take them to the round pen, let them graze, let them walk and do things before they even go to the track. I think little things make a difference. And we do well together. He gets to do more with the owners and the PR part. I’m more the worker with the horses. We both have our say, and it seems to work that way.”

They didn’t take long to find success. After winning one of eight starts in 2002, they topped the million-dollar mark in earnings in 2003 and have been over a million every year, including this year, already, thanks to a solid career win percentage of 15.

His top earner and best horse was Vekoma, whose six-for-eight record included victories in the 2020 Gr. 1 Metropolitan and Gr. 1 Carter Handicap. He earned $1,245,525 and is now standing at Spendthrift Farm.

In 2015, Weaver took a shot at Royal Ascot, sending over Cyclogenesis to contest the Gp. 1 Commonwealth. “He was three-for-three at the time,” Weaver said. “A big heavy horse. He was a nice horse. It just wasn’t his day over there.”

Cyclogenesis finished 14th.

His performance did nothing to diminish Weaver’s appreciation of the experience: “When you get there, it’s clear how special the racing is at Royal Ascot. I was amazed at the place. It’s a hard place to win. I thought when I left in 2015, how cool it would be to win a race there. It’s like a bucket list.”

Crimson Advocate ridden by John Velazquez claimed the narrowest of victories in a thrilling climax to the 2023 Queen Mary Stakes at Royal Ascot.

The filly who would bring him back was Crimson Advocate, a daughter of Nyquist out of Citizens Advocate by Proud Citizen. Crimzon Advocate was purchased for $100,000 at the Ocala Breeders October Yearling Sale by a large ownership group led by Randy Hill, who owned Vekoma and has been sending Weaver horses for 20 years. Other owners are St. John’s University’s new basketball coach Rick Pitino, New York Giants senior personnel consultant and New York Racing Association Board of Directors Chris Mara, Reagan Swinbank, Bill Daugherty of Black Ridge Stables and Jake Ballis of Black Type Thoroughbreds.

Crimson Advocate would make her debut at Keeneland on dirt April 26, well after Cindy had made major strides in her recovery—something she continued after four months in a hospital. 

An unending outpour of support and prayers, especially from horsemen, certainly helped. “It’s a tight-knit group,” Weaver said. “We’re motivated by our love of horses. You can’t do this without loving horses. When she got hurt, it’s a hard thing to go through. It was scary for quite a few months. So many people reached out. It felt good to have the racing community reach out and pull for us and let us know how much support we had out there. It’s been a tough road. We couldn’t have done it without help. There’s a lot of love on the racetrack, and we really appreciate it. This happened a year ago. We’re fortunate that Cindy made a good recovery. She’s still Cindy. We take things one day at a time.”

Crimson Advocate finished an okay third in her 4 ½ furlong maiden debut on dirt at Keeneland. Her next start, her turf debut at Gulfstream Park, was in the Royal Palm Juvenile Filly Stakes. Through a unique partnership between Gulfstream Park and Ascot, the winner of that stakes and the Royal Palm Juvenile Stakes became automatic qualifiers for the Royal Ascot two-year-old stakes race and $25,000 in traveling expenses.

Weaver won both stakes. Crimson Advocate won the filly stakes wire-to-wire by 3 ½ lengths. No Nay Mets, whose ownership includes Houston Astros star Alex Bregman, captured the colt stakes. He raced at Ascot the day after Crimson Advocate and finished 9th  in the Gp. 2 Norfolk Stakes. 

With two starters at Ascot, Cindy had added incentive to make the trip, if she was up to it. “We went to Aspen before Ascot,” Weaver said. She handled that and headed to England with her family.

Crimson Advocate’s new rider would be Velazquez. In a field of 26, his expertise and experience were paramount.

Watching a field of 26 two-year-old fillies racing five-furlongs on a straight course is an interesting experience. There were two distinct groups during the race far away from each other on the course. How a jockey can make judgment calls with that challenging perspective is a skill itself. Fortunately for Velazquez, he was in a sprint with two-year-olds. She would go as fast as she could.

She broke from the rail nearest the grandstand, and Velazquez hustled her to the lead. She seemed in good shape as her group seemed ahead of the other group. But then Relief Rally came flying at her late. They crossed the wire together. 

“I didn’t know if I got it or not,” Velazquez said afterwards.

Weaver, as his custom, assumed the worst: “Usually, when it’s that tight, I assume we got beat, just to prepare myself. After that, I watched a slo-mo replay. While watching that, I thought she might have gotten the bob.”

She had. Her number was posted first on the toteboard. “We were just out of our minds, hugging, kissing, on cloud nine,” Weaver said. 

Hill told Bob Ehalt of Blood-Horse, “It was great. It was so emotional. Cindy was there, and she was crying. I couldn’t get over it. I am so glad for George. We’ve been together for so long and have won some big races together. I know how much this meant to him.”

Just getting to Ascot meant a lot to Weaver and Cindy. “She saw a lot of people she hadn’t seen in a while,” Weaver said.

Cindy said, “I had to really try hard and be strong to try to make this trip,” she said. “I was just hoping that she wound show up and run a good race.”

While waiting out the results of the photo finish, she said, “If she was second, it was okay. I knew she gave her best.”

So did Cindy.

Why HISA matters - A farrier's perspective

Article by Mark Hickcox CF

I wrote the following article titled “Why HISA Matters” for the February/March 2023 issue of No Foot, No Horse, the American Farrier’s Association newsletter magazine. This is one farrier’s perspective of HISA shoeing regulations written to other farriers. The majority of AFA members do not plate racehorses exclusively, but might hear about HISA horseshoe regulations and have questions regarding the effect on the farrier industry. The raceplater farriers are well aware of the effects and confusion surrounding HISA shoeing regulations and are doing their best to stay up to date with the track-specific rules and enforcement that are vastly differing from state to state. Track stewards and paddock blacksmiths have been given no HISA-specific measurement training, updated enforcement guidelines, or detailed specifications other than the non-enforcement on dirt announcement on July 29, 2022. 

Farrier industry or racetrack jargon regarding traction devices and shoe modifications can be confusing and subjective even among a group of farriers. Here’s the scenario: HISA and a group of horsemen are making a decision on a toe grab length that may vary less than the thickness of a dime, based on studies that have never been conducted because the shoe to test this toe grab hasn’t been manufactured, nor can they recognize a front shoe from a hind shoe, this does not set them up for success. The farrier industry is willing to be the experts in the room for such an occasion but weren’t invited for a collective comment until the regulations were well over 6 months old.

In 2023, it seems that HISA has bigger fish to fry, and legal rulings will take precedence over a horseshoe regulation specifications guide or clarification of the process of enforcement, in general. So, when will we see the non-enforcement announcement rescinded? We don’t know. Will the farrier industry be consulted in advance of the next decision to make sure that the shoes being specified will exist this time? We don’t know. Who, what, when, where, and how will enforcement happen at each racetrack and training facility? We don’t know. Are the rumors of new types of injuries due to a lack of traction? We don’t know. 

I have to believe that HISA administration will decide that they should speak with and listen to the Farrier Industry Association; the members include: the farriers, the companies that make the horseshoes, and the supply houses that stock and sell them to the farriers. After all, the title of the AFA magazine should remind them that it’s No Foot, No Horse.

WHY HISA MATTERS

You may have heard from a raceplater friend or seen a post somewhere about new shoeing regulations for Thoroughbred horse racing in the U.S. Most farriers would say it doesn’t affect them because they don’t work on race horses. True, the new law won’t change how most farriers shoe horses today. The new law may have a far greater reach however, by introducing government regulations to farriers and the farrier industry.

United States farriers are a pretty self-regulating bunch of individuals historically. Our education, certification, and proficiency under the horse are not something that is mandated to be a farrier. Whether it’s your full-time career or a skill that you possess to make some extra money, your business is your business. Other countries have laws that govern farriery, and you cannot apply a device to a horse’s hoof without attaining qualified farrier credentials. These regulations are always created for protecting horse welfare and come with a price for someone seeking qualified farrier status. This article is not meant to argue the merits of qualification, certification, education, continuing education, etc. Opinions vary, and agreement is not necessary in regards to HISA, but HISA is a law that does reach into the farrier industry nonetheless.

HISA is the acronym for the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, and it was created when the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act was signed into law in 2020.

“HISA is responsible for drafting and enforcing uniform safety and integrity rules in thoroughbred racing in the U.S. Overseen by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), HISA was created to implement, for the first time, a national, uniform set of rules applicable to every thoroughbred racing participant and racetrack facility. HISA is comprised of two programs: the Racetrack Safety Program, which goes into effect July 1, 2022, and the Anti-Doping and Medication Control (ADMC) Program, which will go into effect in January 2023.” 

“The Racetrack Safety Program includes operational safety rules and national racetrack accreditation standards that seek to enhance equine welfare and minimize equine and jockey injury. The Program will expand veterinary oversight, impose surface maintenance and testing requirements, enhance jockey safety, regulate riding crop use, and implement voided claim rules, among other important measures.”

Most often, horseshoers are the first to notice an issue with a horse’s health that may need veterinary intervention. We are horse men and women that care about an animal’s well-being when they are in our care. We can be held liable for issues related to our services and can keep horse owners up to date with best practices regarding the care of their horse. The service that farriers provide can be life changing, with regard to soundness, and life-saving, with regard to lameness, in many instances. This role is sometimes overlooked by the outside world because we “just shoe horses.” Our products and services can be lumped into a commodity purchase of goods and a service.

Unfortunately for HISA, implementation of the new shoeing regulation has demonstrated that the farrier industry (as a whole) is large, diverse, and multi-faceted just like other industries in our country. We have farriers as the end-user of products purchased from suppliers that are manufactured around the world by many companies that specialize in highly engineered pieces of steel and aluminum. Manufacturing processes require months of planning for raw materials, energy, transportation, labor, packaging, and distribution before a product gets on a supplier’s shelf—in all sizes and shapes necessary. This meant that a shoeing regulation approved by the Federal Trade Commission on March 4, 2022, that affects all racing or training Thoroughbred race horses in the U.S. on July 1, 2022, was idealistic at best. I’m sure that when it was published in the Federal Register on January 5, 2022, it seemed pretty simple.

2276. Horseshoes

(a) Except for full rims 2 millimeters or less from the ground surface of the Horseshoe, traction devices are prohibited on forelimb and hindlimb Horseshoes during racing and training on dirt or synthetic racing tracks.

(b) Traction devices are prohibited on forelimb and hindlimb Horseshoes

(c) Traction devices include but are not limited to rims, toe grabs, bends, jar calks and stickers.

Again, I know that a lot of farriers don’t shoe racehorses. This law will not affect how you shoe horses today, but then I read the following in this magazine:

“Purportedly, bar shoes, pads, glue on shoes, quarter crack patches may only be applied by a covered veterinarian. Those official regulations, however, will come in another phase of the bill.”

This is why we should all care. If the government can pass and implement a law that defines what we can nail on a horse’s hoof in any discipline of equine competition, then it can do it in all of them. This isn’t alarmist rhetoric to start fights or anarchy; it is information to attempt to protect our whole industry: manufacturers, suppliers and farriers. HISA still has legal challenges to clear, enforcement issues to fix, and a newly formed horsemen’s advisory council to blend into the decision-making process. Farriers and other farrier industry professionals should be consulted moving forward because our connection to elite equine athletes is often understated but cannot be ignored. Remember, a lot of folks think that it’s “just shoeing horses.” 

How do I stay informed/get involved?

• Keep advocating for our industry as a small business owner in your community: Chamber of Commerce member, high school trade fair booth, 4-H or pony club demonstration, equine emergency services volunteer, ag community organizations, etc. Remember, your business is your business!

• Stay involved in farrier industry organizations: clinics, contests, certifications, trade shows, supplier’s open house, hammer-ins, virtual education opportunities

• Be aware of industry changes/regulations: multi-discipline knowledge, state laws, federal laws, litigation affecting our industry, new products/technology

• Grass roots activism: Write an email or a letter to political leaders, start a  hoofcare education group for horse owners, improve farrier/vet relations in your coverage area, write an article, publish a yearly farrier newsletter for your clients. 

• Ride-along days: “The hardest door to open is the passenger side of someone else’s farrier truck.”

• Spend one day at a farrier school: Explaining how you do something is a great way to re-evaluate your own work process.

Did you know?

1. The American Farrier’s Association is a member of the American Horse Council. AHC is the only organization that represents the entire horse industry in Washington, DC.

2. The American Veterinary Medical Association spent over $860,000 per year since 2017 as their total lobbying expenditure and had 15 paid lobbyists in 2022.

3. Only 5% of U.S. veterinarians practice on large animals.

4. In 1978, Ada Gates became the first female farrier to become licensed to shoe Thoroughbred racehorses in the U.S. and Canada.

5. The International Union of Journeyman Horseshoers (IUJH) was established in the U.S. in 1874 (also known as the Heavy Horse Union).

6. If you Google “horseshoe regulations,” all results on the first page are about the game.

How HISA has affected the marketing and selling of equine supplements - What trainers need to know

Article by Ken Snyder

In 1834, Thomas Day of Day & Sons in the UK. introduced Day’s Black Drink, an elixir for horses to relieve colic, chills, “low condition” and something called “gripes.” There is no record of the ingredients, and that is probably something best left unknown.

Black Drink was the first known supplement, or product made from natural, not synthetic, substances, as this was the early 19th century. So, too, is heroin derived from a natural substance—poppies. (Created from morphine in 1874, its use on the racetrack was prevalent enough in the early 20th century to help fix races that “horse” became slang for the narcotic in recent history.)

Supplements today range from useless and quackery to many that are considered effective in horse health care by many trainers on the racetrack. In fact, the majority of  Thoroughbred trainers utilize supplements with feed.

Like therapeutic medications and illegal substances, dietary supplements are under the purview of the Horse Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA). Like their drug counterparts, HISA is instituting uniform regulations for supplements in all 50 states. The task falls specifically to the organization’s Horse Integrity and Welfare Unit (HIWU).

Good, bad, or indifferent, the intent of this organization, inarguably, is noble: to make racing safer and healthier for the horses. 

Supplements, however, are seemingly lost in the fog in the scrutiny and attention paid to perhaps the biggest problem in horse racing: medications.

There are potential hazards with supplements, however, and uniform rules across all U.S. racing jurisdictions are in place just as with medications. The key regulation that is now applicable in every HISA jurisdiction specifies that “orally administered vitamins“ and “unsupplemented isotonic electrolyte solutions by oral or intravenous administration” may be administered up to 24 hours prior to post time. This may differ from prior state regulations.

Alexa Ravit, director of communications and outreach for HIWU, outlined the objectives of this regulation and all HISA “regs” in response to an email:

“HISA’s supplements-related regulations (and in particular addressing ‘drug claims’) are intended to protect horsemen from 1) fraudulent or unproven claims of effect; 2) the unknown safety risk to horses in administering these products; and 3) products where the risk of contaminants or unknown components is high due to lack of independent quality controls.”

The task of monitoring and regulating dietary supplements is not nearly as challenging as that for medications, but it is no slam-dunk either. Also, while medications and new withdrawal times for permitted drugs might be a trainer’s focus, trainers should know that, while supplements by and large are safe, there are things to watch for with their use. 

In simplest terms, managing supplements for trainers under HISA/HIWU is following three steps: (1) reading labels (more on this below); (2) being careful in using dietary supplements in combination with approved medications; and (3) not accepting free supplements without understanding what’s on the label.

Mislabeled supplements, according to Rivet, are the major thing that can get a trainer and owner in trouble. She wrote, “If…the product’s labeling…includes a health or structure/function claim, the product is a drug, not a dietary supplement.” Also, drugs are FDA-approved and will carry that information on the label. Supplements won’t. 

In short, trainers need to look first to make sure the supplement does not say “FDA approved.” Supplement labels also should not make “structure/function” claims. HIWU lists these examples:

− Decreases or prevents exercised-induced pulmonary hemorrhaging (EIPH)

− Prevents or treats gastric ulcers
− Manages pain caused by osteoarthritis
− Controls inflammatory airway disease 

− Increases cardiac output
− Increases red blood cell production

The claims are definite, positive and apparently proven by results, warranting approval by the FDA.

Contrast these claims against what will be found for dietary supplements: 

− Sustains lung health
− Maintains gastrointestinal health
− Supports heart health
− Supports bone strength
− Promotes healthy metabolism
− Replenishes electrolytes lost through exercise and sweating

Labels on dietary supplements sound good but stop short of making a promise and, in a couple of instances, are vague at best. “Sustains lung health” and “maintains gastrointestinal health” are things you would want a horse to have after lung or gut issues are solved, and maybe skate closest to a claim like a drug. What supports heart and bone health and strength, respectively, is anybody’s guess. The same goes for promotes healthy metabolism. (Maybe the label will tell one how.) Replenishes electrolytes is a straight-up promise that evidently is achieved with dietary supplements and not drugs. (Gatorade for humans comes to mind.) 

To make another simple distinction, drugs are available only through a prescription from a veterinarian. If a trainer is getting them through another source, there’s potential trouble; but that’s for another story. Supplements are available in tack shops and/or online and do not require a veterinary prescription. 

Ravit, in response to how common it is to see supplements making drug claims contrary to regulations, only said, “It cannot be quantified.” That’s “Governmentese” for “It’s anybody’s guess.”

HISA/HIWU’s own definition of a drug, by the way, is this:

“Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the term “drug” means a product intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, and articles other than food intended to affect the structure or any function of the body.” That’s a mouthful to say it ought to work.; you should get results.

In case you’re wondering why supplements are not regulated by the FDA, the category name “dietary supplements” gives you the answer. The FDA defines them as a “dietary ingredient intended to supplement the diet.” Dietary supplements are not regulated for humans either.

Are they safe? You would think, given the absence of regulation, the answer would be an automatic “yes.” The FDA, however, can take action to remove supplements from the market if they are adulterated (unsafe) or misbranded (misleading). Let the buyer beware.

What a trainer can control are things to avoid, such as mixing supplements with drugs, administering too many supplements, or substituting supplements for drugs altogether. 

HIWU’s language on dietary supplements is actually a bit scary:   

“It is…the responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure the product’s safety and to market the supplement in accordance with applicable law.“

The second part of the statement should give one pause. Yes, the manufacturer is responsible for the product’s safety, but it’s the trainer or trainer’s barn help that is the last person in the literal food chain for the horse. Once a supplement is in a trainer’s hands, he or she is on their own. The safe bet is a veterinarian’s assessment of any risks and/or benefits. 

HIWU addresses this in their literature: “Supplements can interact with some medication with adverse health conditions” advising trainers to “be vigilant and discuss administration [of a supplement] with your veterinarian.”

Ravit also responded with “no comment“ to whether there have already been instances of a supplement producing a positive test for an illegal or controlled substance.

Practicing veterinarians like Dr. Rick Fischer, who has been on the racetrack for 53 years, is, as one would expect, well-versed in the difference between a drug and a supplement. He presents another issue that threatens the health and safety of horses. He and other vets are not always gatekeepers with supplements for trainers. Laymen or salesmen will approach trainers directly promoting supplements. “Worse than that, they’ll give them away: ‘Here are two gallons of this. Use it and see if you like it.’ You really don’t know what the hell you’re getting,” said Fischer.

There are other words on supplements to be mindful of. HIWU’s website warns that “’natural’ does not mean safe, nor does it mean that a product is free of Prohibited Substances.  Neither do “seals of quality assurance” that guarantee a supplement is safe and effective. In short, even practicing veterinarians recommending supplements cannot guarantee safety or effectiveness.

Fischer said there have been instances where a supplement and an approved medication have produced positive tests for banned substances. 

 HIWU’s website advises, “It is crucial to have specialized knowledge from a chemical engineer or pharmacist in order to comprehend and forecast the resulting molecules, due to the intricate interplay between the chemicals involved.” 

 Fischer expounds on the “intricate interplay” thusly: “There’s been positive tests on things that I’ve never even heard of. It’s not something that anybody in their right mind would give a horse. But the chemical breakdown when they’re in combination…who knows? 

“They’ll give you a list of all the different ingredients. Most of it is Greek to these guys and some of it is Greek to me, and I’ve been practicing for more than 50 years.”

Fischer actually parroted HIWU language in saying it would take a chemical engineer or pharmacist to be able to tell “if this molecule matches up with this molecule and what it’s going to come out as.“

Good luck to any trainer looking for a chemical engineer or pharmacist on the backside. 

Dr. Day’s Black Drink, by the way, would not pass muster as a supplement as it claimed to treat colic. As for “gripes,” there is no supplement or drug for that. 

Assessment of historical worldwide fracture and fatality rates and their implications for Thoroughbred racing

Article by Ian Wright

Racing’s social license is a major source of debate and is under increasing threat. The principal public concern is that racing exposes horses to significant risk of injury including catastrophic (life-ending) injuries of which fractures are the commonest cause. The most recent studies conducted in the UK indicate that fractures account for approximately 75% of racetrack fatalities. Recent events highlight the need for urgent stakeholder discussion, which necessarily will be uncomfortable, in order to create cogent justification for the sport and reliant breeding industry.

A necessary prelude to discussion and debate is an objective assessment of risk. All and any steps to reduce risks and mitigate their impact are important and must be embraced for horse racing (and quite possibly all other horse sports) to survive. To begin this, a here and now assessment is important: put simply, does the price paid (risk) justify the benefit (human pleasure, culture, financial gain, employment, tax revenue, etc.)? Objective data provides perspective for all  parties, including the voting public who, via their elected representatives, ultimately provide social license with other welfare issues, both human and animal, on which society must pass judgement. 

The data in Tables 1 to 12 report a country by country survey of fracture and fatality rates reported in scientific journals and documented as injuries/fatalities per starters.  It may be argued that little of the data is contemporary; the studies range from the years 1980 to 2013. However, the tabulated data provided below is the most up to date that can be sourced from independently published, scrutinized scientific papers with clear—albeit sometimes differing—metric definitions and assessable risk rates.

In assimilating and understanding the information, and in order to make comparisons, some important explanatory points are important. The first, and probably the most important, is identification of the metric. Although at first glance, descriptor differences may appear nuanced—what is being recorded massively influences the data. These include fatality, catastrophic injury, fracture, orthopedic injury, catastrophic distal limb fracture, fatal musculoskeletal injury, serious musculoskeletal injury, and catastrophic fracture. 

The influence of the metric in Japanese racing represents the most extreme example of this: “fracture” in the reporting papers included everything from major injuries to fragments (chips) identified after racing in fetlocks and knees, i.e., injuries from which recovery to racing soundness is now an expectation.  At the opposite pole, studies in other countries document “catastrophic,” i.e., life-ending fractures which have a substantially lower incidence.  The spectrum of metric definitions will all produce different injury numbers and must be taken into account when analyzing and using the data. 

Studies also differ in the methods of data collection that will skew numbers in an undetermined manner. Some record only information available at the racetrack, others by identifying horses that fail to race again within varying time periods, and horses requiring hospitalization following racing, etc. The diagnostic criteria for inclusion of horses also vary between reports: some document officially reported incidents only, some are based only on clinical observations of racetrack veterinarians, while others require radiographic corroboration of injuries. 

The majority of fractures that occur in flat racing, and between obstacles in jump racing, are the result of stress or fatigue failure of bone. They are not associated with traumatic events, occur during high speed exercise, are site specific and have repeatable configurations. In large part, these result from horses’ unique athleticism: in the domesticated species, the Thoroughbred racehorse represents the pinnacle of flight-based evolution. Fractures that result from falls in jump racing are monotonic, unpredictable and single-event injuries in which large forces are applied to bone(s) in an abnormal direction. This categorization is complicated slightly as fatigue failure at one site, which may be bone or supportive soft tissue, and can result in abnormal loads and therefore monotonic fracture at another.  

The increased fracture rate in jump racing is explained in part by the cumulative risk of stress/fatigue and monotonic fractures. However, it is complicated by euthanasia of horses with injuries that in animals with greater post injury, commercial value and/or breeding potential might be treated. Catastrophic injuries and fatality rates in NH flat races (designed for young jump racing bred horses to gain experience before racing over obstacles; colloquially termed bumper races) are most logically explained by a combination of the economic skew seen in jump racing and compromise of musculoskeletal adaptation. 

Much has been done to reduce recognizable risk factors particularly in jump racing, but in the UK, it is likely—for obvious data-supported reasons—that it will come under the greatest scrutiny. It might be argued that, outside of Europe, information on jump racing is interesting but of minimal impact to social license elsewhere. However, in the author’s opinion, a holistic perspective is important: loss of one sector or geographic location creates the potential for a momentum-gathering domino effect. 

The incidence of fractures and fatalities in flat racing is low, and the number of currently identified risk factors is high. Over 300 potential influences have been investigated and over 50 individual factors demonstrated statistically to be associated with increased risk of catastrophic injury. 

Racing surface influences both injury frequency and type. Studies in the UK have consistently documented an increased fatality rate and incidence of lower limb injury on synthetic surfaces compared to turf. Although risk differences are clear, confounding issues such as horse quality and trainer demographic mean that the surface per se may not be the explanation. In the United States, studies reporting data from the same geographic location have produced mixed results. 

In New York these documented greater risks on dirt than turf surfaces while a California study found no difference and a study in Florida found a higher risk on turf. A more recent study gathering data from the whole of the US reported an increased risk on dirt surfaces. Variations in injury nature between surfaces, for example the increased incidence of sesamoid fractures (breakdown injuries) on dirt versus synthetic and turf surfaces, may go some way toward explaining fatality differences.

The majority of fractures occurring in flat racing (and non-fall related fractures in jump racing) are now also treatable, enabling horses to return to racing and/or to have other comfortable post-racing lives. The common public presumption that fractures in horses are inevitably life-ending injuries is a misconception that could readily be remedied. An undetermined number of horses are euthanized on the basis of economic viability and/or ability to care for horses retired from racing. On this point, persistence with a paternalistic approach is a dangerous tactic in an educated society.  

Statements that euthanasia is “the kindest” or  “best” thing to do, that it is an “unavoidable” consequence of fracture or that only “horsemen understand or know what is best” can be seen as patronizing and will not stand public scrutiny. At some point, data to distinguish between horses euthanized as a result of genuinely irreparable injuries and those with fractures amenable to repair will become available. Before this point is reached, the consequences require discussion and debate within the racing industry.

Decisions on acceptable policies will have to be made and responsibility taken. In its simplest form, this is a binary decision. Either economic euthanasia of horses, as with agricultural animals, is considered and justified as an acceptable principle by the industry; or a mechanism for financing treatment and lifetime care of injured horses who are unlikely to return to economic productivity will have to be identified.  The general public understands career-ending injuries in human athletes. These appear, albeit with ongoing development of sophisticated treatments at reducing frequency, in mainstream news. Death as a direct result of any sporting activity is a difficult concept in any situation and draws headlines. 

Removal of the treatable but economically non-viable group of injuries from data sets would reduce, albeit by a currently undetermined number, the frequency of race track fatalities. However, saving horses' lives whenever possible will not solve the problem; it will simply open an ethical debate viz is it acceptable to save horses that will be lame.

In order to preserve life, permanent lameness is considered acceptable in people and is not generally considered inhumane in pets. Two questions arise immediately (i) how lame can a horse be in retirement for this to be considered humane? (ii) who decides? There is unquestionably a spectrum of opinion, all of which is subjective and most of it personal. It will not be an easy debate and is likely to be complicated further by consideration of sentience, which now is enshrined in UK law (Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022); but it requires honest ownership of principles and an agreed policy.

For the avoidance of doubt, while the focus of this article and welfare groups’ concerns are on racetrack injuries, those sustained in training follow a parallel pathway. These currently escape attention simply by being, for the most part, out of sight and/or publicity seeking glare. 

Within racing, there is unquestionably a collective desire to minimize injury rates. Progress has been made predominantly by identification of extrinsic (i.e., not related to the individual horse) risk factors followed by logical amendments. In jump racing (monotonic fractures), obstacle modification, re-siting and changing ground topography are obvious examples of risk-reducing measures that have been employed. 

In flat racing, progress, has involved identification risk factors such as race type and scheduling, surface, numbers of runners, track conditions, etc., which have guided changes. However, despite substantial research and investment, progress in identification of intrinsic (i.e., relating to the individual horse) risk factors is slow. While scientifically frustrating, a major reason for this is the low incidence of severe fractures; this dictates that the number of horses (race starters) that need to be studied in order to assess the impact of any intervention is (possibly impractically) high. Nonetheless, scientific justification is necessary to exclude a horse from racing and to withstand subsequent scrutiny.

Review of potential screening techniques to identify horses at increased risk of sustaining a fracture while racing is not within the scope of this article but to date, none are yet able, either individually or in combination, to provide a practical solution and/or sufficiently reliable information to make a short-term impact. It is also important to accept that the risk of horses sustaining fractures in racing can never be eliminated. Mitigation of impact is therefore critical. When fractures occur, it is imperative that horses are seen to be given the best possible on-course care. This may, albeit uncommonly be euthanasia. Much more common, horses can be triaged on the course and appropriate support applied before they are moved to the racetrack clinical facility for considered evaluation and discussion. The provision of fracture support equipment to all British racecourses in 2022 marked a substantial step forward in optimizing injured horse care.

The distress/anxiety that accompanies an acute unstable racetrack fracture is considered predominantly to result from loss of limb control (horses are flight-based herd animals). Pain is both suppressed and delayed by catecholamines, e.g., adrenaline (the latent pain syndrome). As a result, relief of distress and anxiety from appropriate limb support always exceeds chemical analgesia. The immobilization principles behind the fracture support equipment are that fatigue/stress fractures have predictable courses; the distracting forces can therefore be predicted and logically counteracted. This is real progress: adoption of the principles and employment of the equipment in other countries would send out a strong positive welfare message.

Neither racing enthusiasts or fervent objectors are likely to change their opinions. The preservation of social license will be determined by the open-minded majority who lie between. It is the man on the street who must be convinced; most have no concept of the frequency of injury, care available or outcome potentials. 

The task of all who appreciate horse racing's contributions to society and wish to see it continue is to remain focused  on horse welfare, if necessary, to adjust historical dogmas, absorb necessary costs and to encourage open, considered, honest (factually correct) risks versus benefits discussion. 

Country by country survey of fracture and fatality rates as reported in scientific journals and documented as injuries/fatalities per starters from 1980 to 2013.

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.