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Originally Posted by SniperSB23
That is poor breeding if anyone is that unblessed. People do everything possible to not breed a horse to be a turf sprinter.
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But that is what genetics will sometimes throw up. Even classic-type horses will sire sprinters because of 'genetic drift'. That was because the ancestral wild (not feral, like mustangs) horse didn't need top speed for more than 2 or 3 furlongs to put enough distance between them and a predator to escape. It took centuries, nay, millennia of human intervention in horse breeding to produce animals who could run at this speed over a distance of ground. If we suddenly turned all TBs into the wild and let them breed as they choose, in a hundred years none of them would be able to break 2:10 for 10f. Maybe not even 2:20.
I, by the way, have never been in favor of rewarding failed TBs with a million-dollar race in the form of the BC Sprint. Not failed racehorses, you notice, but horses who have failed the challenge of stretching their speed to classic distances, which defines the TB and separates it from its sub-breed, the running Quarter Horse. (Check out QH pedigrees - 75% or more of the names in them are known TBs, with many of the unknowns likely to be TBs taken West for breeding cavalry remounts.)