|
Originally Posted by Phalaris1913
None of those trainers were involved with Alysheba, et al, nor were they examples of products of current training regimes. Not to put words in his mouth, but I pretty sure BB doesn't doubt that horses can be good at 2, 3 and 4 - the question is whether the current infatuation with racing horses as infrequently as possible has a track record of producing horses that can.
I ran a query and got the names of the horses who have won or placed at the G1 level at 2, 3 and 4 who were born over the last 10 years (picked arbitrarily to reflect a trend that is very recent). It's not a very long list and it's not full of horses who seemingly fit the "sparing" model of a couple of starts at 2 and distantly spaced, handful of starts thereafter. Perhaps you would have in mind a different set of criteria and if you do, I can run queries like that until the proverbial cows come home.
I brought up older data, in this case from the early 1960s, because it is pertinent, as much as you'd like to think otherwise. Apologists for the current situation are very fond of going on about how different everything is now, as if racing before last Tuesday might as well have been heat racing contested by offspring of Lexington out of Glencoe mares. Of course it's different - it's different because of accumulated changes in practice. We are merely seeing the latest development of four decades of unhealthy trends toward big money for bloodstock and reduced racing of horses. Do you think the horses you're betting on are the first-generation descendants of horses placed on this planet by aliens? No, they're the second, third and fourth generation descendants of horses of the 1960s who were perfectly capable of doing the things that BB and I are talking about. Despite the best efforts to breed horses that should be culled, a good number of today's horses could also do these things if they had been prepared properly to do them. The reason that they cannot is in large part because preparation, training and racing of horses has changed, not because the horses have changed. In 40 years, there has not been massive genetic drift from "horses that can" to "horses that can't." It doesn't happen that way.
The same physics that applied to thoroughbred racehorses of the 1960s apply to thoroughbred racehorses of 2006. If racing were inherently destructive, then it would've been just as destructive to those foals of the late 1950s as it is now. Why wasn't it? That's the question. There was nothing magical about those horses that made them impervious to injury, there was just a combination of factors that made them better able to withstand the job of being a racehorse.
Not all of those factors can be laid at the feet of training practices. As I said in an early post on this thread, perhaps those foals bred by breeder/owners left to play at pasture instead of stalled arrived at the track with stronger legs. Maybe the tracks were softer. There are different drugs in play today, but don't forget that bute was legal in some jurisdictions when the horses on those lists were running, and in those days, drug testing wasn't nearly as able to detect violations with the drugs that were available.
However, there are conspicuous differences in the way that well-intended horses were trained and raced and it is reasonable to investigate which, if any, of those changes are correlated to longer, more successful, more injury-free careers. To my eyes, these are glaring changes, and there are experimentally determined facts about horses which call into question the wisdom of some of these changes.
|