Glory Days

The following post appeared first in the November 14 issue of European Bloodstock news as my bi-weekly "Letter from America"

Glory Days, well they’ll pass you by,

Glory Days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye

Glory Days, Glory Days

I suspect Bruce Springsteen has never been quite the icon on your side of the Atlantic that he is in America. His songs embody a particularly, unabashedly American ethos that I doubt resonates as viscerally in other cultures.

Most everybody loves a great rock song, though, just as everyone in the Thoroughbred industry loves high prices, and lord knows, we had plenty of those at our November breeding stock auctions. Glory days indeed.

The Fasig-Tipton November sale began calmly enough, but once Love and Pride, a spectacular physical specimen with a race record and pedigree to match, sold for $4.9-million to Brazilian Goncalo Borges Torrealba, all hell broke loose. And it wasn’t just that there were better horses that followed Love and Pride into the ring than had preceded her. Everyone in the industry knows that a horse like Love and Pride should bring a certain price (in her case $4-to-$5-million), and once they hit the mark, it makes signing other tickets for millions of dollars so much easier. The feel of the marketplace changes from caution to let the good times roll with the crack of the gavel.

At the end of a memorable evening 24 mares had sold for $1-million or more at Newtown Paddocks, and Keeneland sold another 14 in that range over the next two days across town. Those 38 seven figure mares were purchased by 21 different individual buyers. The principal residences of those buyers (as far as we know at this point) are located in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Greece, Qatar, and USA. Clearly the resurgent Thoroughbred market is a global phenomenon.

We have been wondering if or when the Qataris would dive into our market as vigorously as they have yours, and Sheikh Joann did not disappoint, purchasing dual Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint winner Mizdirection for $2.7-million. That was, however, the only high-profile Qatari purchase. Sheikh Mohammed’s forces continued to be conspicuous only by their virtual absence, purchasing one Street Cry weanling they co-owned on a foal share for $350,000.

Four years ago when the market was in the dungeon following the global economic meltdown of October 2008, I do not think anyone would have been foolish enough to predict that four years hence we would not need Sheikh Mohammed to enjoy a vibrant market for Thoroughbred bloodstock. That, in fact, has been pretty much unthinkable for more than 30 years now, but it was obviously true at the two bloodstock sales in Lexington last week.

After watching your horses beat everyone but Wise Dan on grass at the Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita last week it is obvious that you have better horses than we do right now, so what price glory at Goff’s and Tattersalls over the next month? Even here the top-priced lot was a Galileo three-quarter sister to Yesterday and Quarter Moon purchased by Coolmore for $5.2-million.

After years of wondering whether they would survive the latest bloodstock recession it did the heart good to see smiles on the faces of so many old friends in Lexington last week. True, there are fewer left to smile, but that is the way of the world.

Those that are left understand that the glory days can disappear, indeed as quickly as the wink of a young girl’s eye...or perhaps the wink of an eye of that lovely young mare now residing in their broodmare barn.

Christmas is coming

One of the good things--trust me there were not many--to come out of the Thoroughbred Times bankruptcy was the fact that, through the good offices of TT's founder and editor Mark Simon, I ended up with the remaining unsold boxes of my book Foundation Mares. Published by Thoroughbred Times in 2008, Foundation Mares expanded and elaborated on a series of articles in the weekly print edition of the magazine. The book sold pretty well, but at the time of the bankruptcy there were some boxes of books at the printer's in Wisconsin that were going to be destroyed.

Instead, after considerable angst and no little expense on my part, they are sitting in my basement, and frankly they would make great Christmas gifts for anyone in the horse business.  As always, the wonderful Thoroughbred Times staff did a great job producing a beautiful and useful book and the stories ultimately tell the history of Thoroughbred racing in America, tracing all the way back to the famous unnamed Cub mare who was imported from England in the 1760s.

If you would like to put a smile on a racing enthusiast's face on Christmas morning you can order a signed copy of the book for $65 (including shipping costs) by emailing me at ormonde1@gmail.com. Or if you prefer, you can order the book through Amazon.com, but please scroll down and order through my Amazon seller account at JPS Inc. If you order by either of those two methods, I get paid. If not, I never see a cent of the money.

Such is life after a messy bankruptcy.

Memory Wall

I suppose what follows can serve as my requiem for Thoroughbred Times. It is one of my favorite weekly columns in Thoroughbred Times Today, first published, according to my records, on February 25, 2011. 

American novelist and short story writer Anthony Doerr is obsessed with memory. In his unforgettable novella Memory Wall, future technology allows the memories of an aging victim of Alzheimer's disease to be downloaded to digital cartridges so that she can revisit them as dementia advances.

I'm ready for my memory download. More importantly, Thoroughbred racing is desperately in need of an analog of Doerr's memory cartridges for the American sporting public.

I first became interested in Thoroughbred racing in the mid-1950s after inhaling Walter Farley's Black Stallion series of books. In those post-war boom years, wagering on horse racing was the only legal way to gamble everywhere but Las Vegas, and crowds of 50,000 and more crowded the largest tracks regularly on both coasts.

Newspapers in major cities carried race results on their sports pages, at least on the big weekends. Reading Anthony Doerr and thinking about how memory works somehow sparked a mental visual of a photo that appeared in the Nashville Tennessean in May, 1957 of the finish of the Peter Pan Stakes.

The photo, which I am sure was grainy and could not have been of very high quality on newsprint in any case, showed one of my first racing heroes *Gallant Man beating Promised Land and Nah Hiss. I think one of the reasons that photo—an ordinary three-quarter head-on finish picture—stuck in my mind for more than 50 years was the ominous, mysterious character of the third place finisher's name. Think about it...optimistic, noble names like *Gallant Man and Promised Land followed by....Nah Hiss!

(The Peter Pan was the last of three stakes-placings by Nah Hiss, a colt by Call Over out of Waymark, by Nedayr, who retired after five seasons of racing with seven wins in 73 starts and earnings of $49,817. Yes, they made them tougher in those days.)

Ten-year-olds in rural Tennessee, suburban Des Moines, or the heart of New York City nowadays have virtually zero chance of developing a persistent memory of their own version of Nah Hiss. Racing coverage in non-specialist newspapers, television, or sporting websites is virtually non-existent except for the biggest events of the year. Interests and habits developed in childhood often last a lifetime, but Thoroughbred racing currently has no viable conduit for reaching those kids whose psyches would be susceptible to the addictive charms of our sport.

Where is the Zenyatta/Rachel Alexandra racing video game for Playstation? Where is the Jockey Challenge for the Wii platform? Talk about a workout! Anyone who has ever ridden with short stirrups knows how many calories that would burn.

The Breeders' Cup at least has an iPad and iPhone app that sends racing news to those devices, and the NTRA offers a download of the NTRA Virtual Horse Racing game, but that is not nearly enough. The current generation of ten-year-olds is plugged in to personal computers, cell phones, or gaming devices 24/7, and if we cannot reach them what kind of future do we have when they are the adults with discretionary income?

In Doerr's story, the memory cartridges ultimately benefit those around the aging woman far more than they do her. The memory of the moments just before her fossil-hunter husband's death leads to the discovery of a fossil worth millions that, by somewhat circuitous means, go to her poor caretaker.

In the digital age, a comparable payoff is out there for Thoroughbred racing. All we need is the creativity and the will to find it.

Long time no blog

Regular readers of this blog--should there be any of you left--will be well aware of the long, sad downward spiral into bankruptcy of Thoroughbred Times that finally reached its inevitable conclusion about a year ago. While that certainly is not my only excuse for not blogging for over two years, it certainly had a lot to do with it. 

The eventual fate of Thoroughbred Times was evident long before the final denouement, but denial is a powerful thing. So too is loyalty, if you happen to be afflicted with it. Unfortunately, 16 years of loyalty and devotion to Thoroughbred Times turned out to be a one-way street, vis a vis the corporate ownership. But then corporations, no matter what the Supreme Court says, are not people and loyalty is seldom one of their virtues.

My all time favorite literary quote, though, is from Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. In fact the purpose of the entire plot of that early Vonnegut novel is to arrange for the hero, Malachi Constant, to say “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” Life happens.

I have been the “victim” of a long series of quite happy accidents throughout my life, and one of the happiest occurred about a year before the demise of the Times when a new consulting client came along at the most opportune time imaginable. That more or less coincided with my last previous blog post and, in truth, probably had as much to do with the hiatus as anything else.

The new client created both new demands on my time and a new outlet for the creative energy needed for blogging. The Pedigree Curmudgeon blog faded in importance as the pedigree curmudgeon himself got more, and more enjoyable, work to do.

Not too long after I stopped posting on this blog, I also found another delightful outlet for thoughts that might once have appeared here. My old friend Terence Collier recommended me to his old friend Paddy Finlason of European Bloodstock News to write a biweekly “Letter from America” for EBN. If you’re not familiar with EBN, you should be, and you can become familiar by checking out their website at http://www.bloodstocknews.eu/home/   and subscribing to the newsletter. You won’t regret it.

My EBN “Letter from America” is designed to be informal, chatty, personal and entertaining, all of the characteristics of a good blog post. In fact, I think my next blog post will be a reprint of one of my favorite contributions to EBN.

Anyway, welcome back to The Pedigree Curmudgeon. Future posts may well be EBN letters, or reposts of my weekly column in Daily Racing Form’s new DRF Breeding newsletter. Or they may be something entirely original.

Who knows what happy accidents are in store?

Thoroughbred Pedigree, Genetics, and Performance Conference


2:00 p.m.


The conference now devolves into breakout sessions with several different speakers at the same time. Personally, I've had enough and I'm going to sign off here.

The biggest difference for me between this year's conference and the first one last year is that it was much more blatant that virtually all of the presenters represent commercial ventures and they have something to sell us. Given who the organizers are and the economic system we live in, this was never going to be pure science, but it is a little disconcerting to feel like the presenters are as or more interested in hawking products as disseminating information.

Cheers!
JPS


1:00 p.m.


Steve Roman begins the afternoon session.

Roman will cover his ideas on aptitudinal type. First begins by comparing different definitions of speed....i.e. final time, average speed, fractions. Stamina....speed over a distance or winning over a distance? Somebody has to win the race, regardless of speed. Any horse can run any distance if you give it enough time.

American time records fall in an almost straight correlation line, projected from the shorter distances. Roman calls that line the genetic frontier of speed.  Although the times have changed, the shape and linearity of the line has not changed since 1976. That measures an increase in speed over the last 35 years.

Dosage not a breeding theory, not a handicapping scheme, or a betting scheme for Ky. Derby.

Defines dosage as a methodology applied to large populations for classifying pedigrees by aptitudinal type, as a research tool correlating type with real world performance.

Roman produces good slides that show that dosage index and center of distribution decline with distance both in the U.S. and every other country he's tested. The key point is that the line is highest for American dirt horses, which means, as Roman says that American dirt horses are the most speed bred horses in the world.

Roman spends a lot of time defending the dual qualifier concept, despite his earlier claim that dosage is not a handicapping tool. Unfortunately he has to expand the concept to include horses like Smarty Jones who were not rated on the Experimental Free Handicap.








11:15 a.m.


Jeff Seder of EQB up next on heart ultrasounds.

Begins by showing average for the breed statistics as a baseline level. Believes a lot of performance has to do with who is really trying and which ones will put up with pain.

Talking about a published study on heart ultrasound.

Study based on over 7k horses, divide those into categories, colts fillies, US, foreign, dirt-turf, etc.
How do you use heart data
Size of left ventricle at relaxation....fillies and colt sizes very different. Growth curves are different. Train diligently to insure reproducibility of heart measurements. Size and weight of the horse matter. Age is also critical to get accurate measurements. Thickness of the septal wall is also very important.

Horses ranking above the 75th percentile in left ventricle size earn more. No surprise.

These measures do tend to differ by sire and sire line. No surprise that Northern Dancer and sons produced very high percentages of big hearts and thick septal walls.

Trying to figure out which sires are going to produce big hearts is very hard to predict. Dynaformer for example tends to produce smaller hearts but with thick septal walls.

Lunch break.








10:00 a.m.


Bob Fierro and Jay Kilgore up next of DataTrack international on stride length

As usual, raconteur Bob starts off with a funny story about a trip to Argentina, where the mythical national hero shares his last name. Then he describes how DataTrack invented their Breeze Figs, which rate horses according to stride length and other measures at juvenile sales. DRF now publishes daily Breeze Figs for 2yos for their first four starts.

Graded SW have an average stride length of 24 feet or greater....drop down a level to listed winners and it's under 24 feet.....and so on.

Jay Kilgore gives some details on how their video analysis of stride efficiency works with stills of digital video. Fascinating video showing how horses feet move as they run. The computer attaches points as it were to the horse's feet, nose, etc. to measure efficiency of movement. Video showing lines that the points make through space are visually very effective.







9:40 a.m.


After several frustrating hours of being unable to connect to the wireless internet here at the Griffin Gate Hotel in Lexington, I am finally connected and ready to resume live-blogging.

John Seaman of Cecil Seaman and Co. just finished his presentation on breeding type to type.

Most of John's discussion was about their measurement of body length as an indicator of overall body size. He presented numerous slides showing how similar body types tend to predominate in the pedigrees of successful racehorses. This tends to be the basic message of biomechanics gurus. Mating horses with similar body types and measurements tends to work better than matings of dissimilar types. This will not be news to anyone who has been doing matings for 40 years. ....or, indeed, considerably less than that.

More to follow

2011 Pedigree and Genetics Symposium, Lexington, Kentucky.

Professor Jamie McCleod of UK began the symposium by going over basic genetics.

2:44


Bill Oppenheim is here! Lol.

Speaking on The Myths we live by: Data we use and its limitations strategies for a chaotic universe.

Racing is a business without borders, a free market economy, and there is is a finish line. The best horse wins.

Both scientists and pedigree students want to replicate the successful patterns of good horses. That which has happened before is more likely to happen again. The question is exactly what is it thatl we're looking for.

Pitfalls:
Small sample size: early success leads to breeders following the hot cross, which later falls prey to the law of averages. Storm Bird/Secretariat mares. First 8 crops 36% SW, last 10 crops 2% SW. Overall actually just an average cross for the sire.

As soon as we know something works, it's outdated, because there's a 4 or 5 year lag between mating and result. Lines wax and wane in strength. It is a myth that once we discover a great cross all we have to do is continue to do it. The greater the numbers the less the success.

Bill doesn't much care for the nicking companies, he makes it pretty clear. As usual, the problem is with numbers and quality. There are too often not enough cases to reliably predict anything. Bill is much more interested in accurately identifying success.






1:40 p.m.


Skipped over Bill Oppenheim to go next with Sid Fernando on adding stamina to the Thoroughbred.

Stamina in this country is analogous to low "good cholesterol"....Got to pay attention or we'll have a heart attack.

Early 1970s--2 G1 equivalents at 1 3/4 miles or more. No G1 races at 6 furlongs. We gave more weight to distance and less to speed. Today 20 G1 6-7 furlong races for 3yos and up. None over 1 1/2 miles. Europe and Japan have continued on a path in racing and bloodlines where stamina has remained importance.






1:00 p.m.


Steve Tamariello of Performance Genetics is next.

Discarded the test he promoted last year and now focusing on performance tests through linkage disequilibirum....which is non-random association of alleles at two or morel loci, not necessarily on the same chromosome. Wants to identify genetic variants associated with speed, using linkage disequilibrium (?).

American horses have a distinct phenotype for dirt track races. Chose peak Beyer speed as their measure of racing ability. Separated population into 2 stringent categories.
Grade 1 winning 108 or higher, but no G3 or Listed SW, or allowance horses. non-Elites =78 or lower Beyer speed, generally similar quality sires and dams.

Sample size=60.....Again sample size. But then later says 365 horses without reconciling the two numbers. Who knows.

Found associations to elite performance on ten different chromosomes....more than other researchers have found.

Most interesting thing Tamariello shows is that according to their performance test, Mineshaft and Pretty Discreet both test as route runners, Mineshaft elite, Pretty Discreet not so much, but their son Discreetly Mine tests as a G1 sprinter, which is exactly what he was.






11:12 a.m.


That was fun. Emmeline basically stonewalled Lambert's question (see below for her answer). The controversy between Lambert/Binns and Hill comes basically from the fact that Hill makes bigger claims for the power of her tests than other geneticists do, and they do not take that lightly. And since in the modern world whoever yells loudest gets the most attention, it turns out to be quite important commercially.

Stephen Harrison up next.

Contrary to popular belief, the Thoroughbred is quite outbred compared to many other breeds. It's a probability model, and the more tests you have the better predictor you have.

Harrison's specialty has been Mitochondria, so he dives right in on that.

Original 2006 study found 13 different functional MtDNA genes. Looked at variations in stamina levels, quality, interaction with stallion mtDNA, etc. 33 different mtDNA types in Thoroughbred.

Some evidence of positive interactions between stallions and particular mtDNA types in mares. Invincible Spirit and Fusaichi Pegasus, for example did better than expected with certain types. No mention of sample size however. Small study showed that best ratios of mtDNA to nuclear DNA was for mtDNA type to same mtDNA type between sire and dam.

Someone from Emmeline's school attacks Harrison's data about mtDNA from males mixing. Says it's very well established that mtDNA is very well established coming only from the female in mammals. Harrison tries to defend. This is basically over everybody else's head except for the scientists. Harrison doesn't really answer.





10:00 a.m.


Brief set of questions from audience. Emmeline Hill up next. This could get interesting.

Emmeline begins by saying only four genes have been definitely identified as associated with performance in Thoroughbreds. Naturally, all of those are from her studies as far as I can tell from the slide.

Begins with rehashing Myostatin and her so-called "speed gene". Not a test for class, but only for preferred distance. Still insists that her marker for Myostatin is more accurate than other markers, in contradiction to what Matthew Binns showed in his talk.

Largest change in the expression of the myostatin gene due to training is in the CC sprint type. In other words, CC horses respond more quickly and more precociously to training than CT or TT horses. That is an interesting finding, confirmation that CC is related to precocity. It makes sense that the sprint genotype would have a big influence on 2yo racing.

Moves on to PDK4 gene's association with performance. First found an association but could not replicate. Then looked for novel variants that might have some effect, but again couldn't replicate original findings. Hypothesized that different genes may be interacting with the myostatin gene. Found a strong association with the stamina type horses, so implies that PDK4 gene is important for longer distance exercise, but not shorter distances.

Elite performance test. You get stronger results from the CCs and TTs, but different genes associated with performance in the different types. This is related to why what used to be called fish and fowl matings generally don't work....Different genes are required for success at shorter and longer distances, and therefore and they don't work together that well.

Technology is not a silver bullet, but it will increase your chances of improving your strike rate.

Hill's Class 1 and Class II horses earned more money than they cost at sales. Class III and IV did not.

That's a good result, but the problem for Hill is that she only uses blood samples not hairs. Therefore her tests are useless as a way of cutting down your short list at a sale, because it takes two weeks to get a result. Cannot be done overnight like hair sample tests. That's the source of the contention between Hill and Binns over which test is more accurate.

Uh Oh. David Lambert of Genetic Edge challenge's Hill on the numbers in her sample size.

Hill responds that they are capturing genetic potential, management and environment are hugely important. Equinome has applied for an international patent on myostatin that includes other people's markers....that's going to be trouble. In response to numbers, she claims even in small sample size, the proof is strong. "of course the more samples you have the more power that you have, but what we're able to do is capture the genes having the greatest influence on performance."









9:00 a.m . 
Matt Binns up next.

Matt will cover:
Genetic perspective on traditional pedigree methods; Characteristics of genetically complex traits;
Genetic Edge products---

Pedigree is a surrogate for genetics. The thoroughbred is a perfect playground for geneticists because of the 300 years of records.

Good illustration using Zenyatta's pedigree of how her 5x5 inbreeding to Nashua actually works genetically. The statistical chances of getting the same genes from both of her crosses of Nashua are actually very small.

Binns thinks nicking exists....Complementary positive genes being inherited, but it operates at a relatively low probability because of the basic facts of genetic inheritance.

There has been a slight increase in %inbreeding since the 1960s, according to comparative DNA genomes, but it's only slight. Reinforces Bailey's point about diversity.

Correlation between 8-generation coefficient of inbreeding from pedigree and what you get if you do it by DNA testing is very low. Surprising result. The problem is that there are a limited number of variants at sites in horses but they can come from different sources than what genetic theory says.

Presents new research that produced loci for white coat color markings in Thoroughbreds.

Now we're smoothly into the Genetic Edge pitch. The familiar ABCD scoring system. Data predicts that the performance panel can eliminate about 50% of individuals from short list and retain about 75% of the short list. Only 5% of Grade Ds are Graded SW.

10% of pop are As, Bs and Cs are 40% each. A's increase your chances of getting GSW 3 to 1.

Distance marker: If you want to win a G1 sprint, you'd better be homozygous for the distance marker (myostatin). About half the Kentucky Derby winners, though are also homozygous for the sprint distance marker.

Goes after Emmeline's claim that her test is more accurate, and effectively debunks it. The gloves are off this year folks.

Concludes that this is still fairly young science. This speaks to one of the big problems with acceptance and use of genetic tests. Everybody wants to wait five years until they can see the results of predictive studies.







8:50 a.m.

Now Dr. Ernie Bailey is applying what Jamie said to horses.

Gus emphasizes that contrary to popular belief, there is still a lot of genetic diversity to exploit in Thoroughbreds. Thoroughbreds are genetically less diverse than other horses because of 300 years of selection for speed, soundness and stamina, but they are far more diverse than other species that might look more diverse like dogs.



I'll be live-blogging periodically from the second annual Pedigree and Genetics symposium at the Griffin Gate Hotel in Lexington today.

The first two speakers are covering basic genetics, so there's not that much of interest there, but then the fun should start with Matthew Binns of the Genetic Edge, so check back later.

American exceptionalism

The following article was first published in Thoroughbred Times Today on July 1, 2011.

According to the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA), the best racehorse on the planet right now is either the brilliant, unbeaten Australian sprinter Black Caviar or the brilliant, unbeaten English miler Frankel. And who might be the IFHA and why should we care what their rankings are, you ask?

As its name implies, the IFHA is an international organization comprised of racing organizations from more than 60 countries, including the American Jockey Club and the NTRA, that seeks to coordinate and harmonize racing rules and practices around the racing world. And we should pay attention to their rankings because the rest of the world does.

The IFHA has evolved from the organization founded by Jean Romanet and Marcel Boussac, who hosted the first international meeting among the racing authorities of France, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States at the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe meeting in 1961. By 1967 the first International Conference of Horseracing Authorities, also hosted in Paris by the Societe d'Encouragement (then the French racing authority headed by Romanet), attended by representatives from nine countries, including the original four. Representation expanded to 110 delegates from 50 countries by 1993, and the name of the organization was changed to the current title in 1994. The International Stud Book Committee, the International Cataloging Standards Committee, and the Society of International Thoroughbred Auctioneers all operate in association with the IFHA.

The World Thoroughbred Rankings list originated as the International Classification of the best horses in Great Britain, France, and Ireland in 1977. North American trained horses were first included in the rankings in '95, and Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand were added in '97 and '98. The annual rankings now include more than 650 horses worldwide, all ranked on a scale derived from the original European handicapping system, a scale of weights similar to historic American “free handicap” weights, but with a higher range of weights. Horses are given separate ratings for dirt, synthetic, and turf performances, and they are weighted according to their best performance in a single race, not overall form.

Very few American-trained horses were included in the early years, but the inauguration of the Dubai World Cup (UAE-G1) and the expansion of international races around the world, including the Breeders' Cup meeting, has given international handicappers a better handle on American form. In most recent years, their opinion has not been flattering to American racing.

World Thoroughbred Rankings cover a rotating six-month period and are issued about every two months. The most current rating list on the IFHA website (http://www.horseracingintfed.com/resources/2011Rankings/2011_0526_WTR.asp) covers the period from December 1, 2010 through May 23, 2011. The first 12 horses listed, at weights ranging from 130 to 122 pounds are trained in Australia, England, Ireland, Italy, Singapore, South Africa, and France. Animal Kingdom and Shackleford are the joint highest rated American-trained horses at 121 pounds, and only six other American-trained horses—Big Drama, Gio Ponti, Astrology, Jeranimo, Sidney's Candy, and Twirling Candy—appear among the 53 horses currently rated.

As in the larger world of international affairs American racing aficionados have become accustomed to believing that American horses are the best in the world. For the 30 years from about 1968 to 1997 or thereabouts, that was, on average almost certainly true. For at least the last decade, though, as demonstrated by international race meets like the Dubai Carnival and the Breeders' Cup, it is glaringly obvious that American-trained horses are superior to the rest of the world only on dirt.

Among the 60-plus member countries of the IFHA, however, only a few South American countries like Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay race predominantly on dirt. In North America in 2010, 76% of the races were on dirt, accounting for 63% of available purse money. Great Britain, Ireland Italy, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Singapore, all with horses rated higher than any American horse on the current ratings, all race exclusively or predominantly on turf.

American exceptionalism, the idea that America is qualitatively different—in so many words, better—than other countries, may or may not still be a viable concept in political circles. In the context of Thoroughbred racing, however, the rest of the world has clearly decided that it is an outdated belief.

The sooner we recognize that and act to change negative perceptions of American racing created by race-day medication and other factors, the sooner we can begin to reimpose American exceptionalism. And the sooner we can sell more horses to them at better prices.

Compete or die

I did not attend the International Summit on Race Day Medication, EIPH, and the Racehorse held on June 13-14 at Belmont Park. Therefore I cannot speak from first-hand knowledge of everything that transpired over those two days among the reported 72 conferees, but I am sad to say that press reports so far leave me somewhat less than inspired and hopeful.

The principal achievement of the summit was....wait for it....to agree to have another meeting. As Peggy Lee sang too long ago for younger readers to remember, “is that all there is?”

Eric Wing, the NTRA's media director said, “No specific recommendations were announced but areas of broad interest were identified.” Perhaps I am being too cynical, but to me that means exactly the same thing it means when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she had “frank discussions” with her foreign counterparts—nobody could agree on anything. That is what happens when you get parties in a room with diametrically opposed agendas and self interests.

The principal problem American racing faces is finding a way to phase out race-day furosemide (Lasix or Salix). Trainers and veterinarians tend strongly to be on one side of the issue—in favor of race-day Lasix—and racing's administrators, owners, breeders, and international observers tend to be on the other.

One issue that was at least brought out into the open for the first time was the definition of “bleeding”. Prior to the 1970s and '80s, before the big push from trainers and veterinarians to legalize furosemide, a bleeder was a horse who visibly bled from the nostrils after a race or workout. That in fact was pretty much the universal definition of the malady in use at least since the days of the line-founding stallion Herod, born in 1758.

Advocates of race-day furosemide use, though, managed to conflate the term bleeder with exercise induced pulmonary hemorrhage (EIPH), a condition that is common in human athletes, greyhounds, and racing camels as well as equines. EIPH, essentially means the presence of blood, even tiny flecks, in the airway as a result of exercise. In horses, EIPH occurs in a significant percentage of horses after mild canters. That means, by the way, that some horses cantering and playing in their paddocks would likely incur EIPH. And, no, I am not trying to minimize the humane significance of EIPH, just stating facts.

Racing jurisdictions abroad, however, have never changed their definition of bleeding. Visible blood from the nostrils (epistaxis) is required for a horse to be defined as a bleeder. In some jurisdictions, such as Australia, observed epistaxis requires a lengthy ban from racing, and repeated episodes can lead to a permanent ban.

American trainers tend to assume that their situation—training at racetracks in large cities—is uniquely stressful on their horses. Have they ever been to Hong Kong? That city of seven million people is a match in terms of crowding, pollution, and other stressful factors for any American city. Race-day Lasix is not allowed in Hong Kong, and their horses have started to win races all over the world.

American horses do not win nearly as many races all over the world as they once did. That is no doubt partly because we have sold many of our best potential stallions and broodmares abroad for 30 years and the rest of the world has caught up, but that is not the only reason. If you understand genetics at all, it is not hard to understand that race-day medication is bound to increase dependence on such drugs over time.

American trainers and veterinarians need to understand that if they wish to have a business to run, horses to train and doctor ten or 20 years from now, they are going to have to adjust their viewpoint. American racehorse owners are not going to continue in a business the public increasingly sees as tainted by drugs. American breeders cannot continue indefinitely breeding horses that no one but vanishing American owners will buy.

Even if we agree that American conditions are different from foreign conditions—and they are—in the long run it does not matter. Globalization is here in Thoroughbred racing, and it has been here for about 15 years.

Our choice is either to retreat from the global village and die a long, painful death, or to embrace it and compete on even terms.

Ode to Epsom

The following was first published in Thoroughbred Times Today on June 3, 2011.

Like many other classic races around the world, the Belmont Stakes was modeled on the Epsom Derby, which will be run for the 232^nd time tomorrow—if you count wartime Derbys that were run at Newmarket in 1915-18 and 1940-45.

More accurately known simply as the Derby Stakes, the true father of all classic races is the third oldest classic in the world. Both the St. Leger Stakes (G1), founded in 1776, and the Derby's companion race for fillies, the Epsom Oaks, inaugurated a year earlier than the Derby, are older. But the Derby has always been the most prestigious horse race in England, and that is why virtually every country around the world copied it as closely as local conditions allowed.

France came first, kicking off the Prix du Jockey-Club as the French equivalent of the Derby in 1836, and other countries followed almost as soon as their racing programs stabilized. In many cases it was the invention of local Derbys, as well as echoes of the other English classics, the Oaks, Two Thousand Guineas, One Thousand Guineas, and St. Leger, that formed the foundation for stabilizing those racing and breeding programs.

That was certainly the case in the United States. When racing resumed in New York at Jerome Park late in 1865 after the conclusion of the long and bloody Civil War, foundation of a race modeled after the Derby was one of the first orders of business for the wealthy bankers and industrialists intent on putting the horrors of the war well behind them. Leonard Jerome, though, went against tradition by naming his Derby equivalent the Belmont Stakes, after his primary financial backer, August Belmont I.

As American racing consolidated its shift from four-mile heat racing that had dominated prior to the War Between the States, other states soon followed suit, most notably Kentucky, which inaugurated its equivalent Derby in 1875. Over the years, the prestige of all these races waxed and waned with the times, and it was not until after World War I that the Kentucky race began to gain preeminence in America, and, in some senses, the world.

By that time the Kentucky Derby had been reduced from its original distance of 1 ½ miles to 1 ¼ miles, in deference to its position on the calendar a month before the Epsom classic. Meanwhile, the Belmont was raced at several distances over its first 60 years and did not settle at its current distance until 1926.

None of these global imitators, though, truly could match Epsom's unique conditions. The greatness of the Epsom Derby as the truest test of the Thoroughbred lies in the complex terrain of the racecourse itself. Myth has it that there is not one level square foot of ground on the wide, sweeping, horseshoe-shaped course. That is not quite true, but, as with most myths, there is truth in the thought.

The Derby course begins far across the chalky Surrey Downs from the grandstand, and climbs rather steeply uphill around a gentle right-handed curve for most of the first half-mile. As the course straightens out briefly at the top of the hill, the horses cross to the left hand rail and begin the steep descent around a left-handed curve to Tattenham Corner, 3 ½ furlongs from the finish. The course slopes downhill for another furlong or so before rising sharply again over the last furlong and a half.

It is a roller-coaster ride that tests a young three-year-old in more different ways than any other racecourse in the world. The horse must have the stamina to cope with a breakneck pace up that killing first half mile, the agility to turn right, turn left, and run uphill and down at racing pace. Then he must be able to accelerate in the last two furlongs on a course that doesn't just look to him by then as if it is tilting toward the inside rail. The natural camber of the land actually does slope from the outside toward the inner rail in addition to being uphill at that point. Thus countless tired horses have staggered toward the inside rail in Epsom's final furlong.

That is why the Derby remains the Derby. Non-stayers cannot win. Plodders without speed and acceleration cannot win. Horses who easily become unbalanced and lose their action cannot win.

Federico Tesio was right. The Thoroughbred is what it is because of a piece of wood—the finishing post at Epsom.

A feature not a bug

Every year when Triple Crown season rolls around, complaints about the 1 1/2-mile distance of the Belmont Stakes (G1) resurface. Certain trainers in particular annually call for the distance to be shortened to 1 1/4 miles, and even go so far as to suggest shortening the Kentucky Derby (G1) to 1 1/8 miles so that the three Triple Crown races provide a steady progression of distances.

Fortunately that sentiment does not seem to have gained much traction, because, as software engineers are wont to say about perceived flaws in their products, the distance of the Belmont is a feature not a bug. Furthermore, in an all too insular industry that finally seems to be waking up to the negative way the rest of the world views our racing program, it is a feature that may well become a much stronger selling point in the future.

The Belmont is the oldest of the American classic races, inaugurated by Leonard Jerome in 1867, the year after the Wall Street speculator opened his eponymous racetrack in the north Bronx. Founder of the American Academy of Music and grandfather of Winston Churchill, Jerome designed the race as an American equivalent of the 1 1/2-mile Epsom Derby, and named it after banker August Belmont Sr., who financed construction of the track. Jerome Park's amenities were described as lavish, complete with an elegant ballroom and a clubhouse that rivaled the city's most luxurious hotels.

Jerome Park returned first-class horse racing to New York, following a hiatus during the Civil War. The Belmont was originally run at 1 5/8 miles, but fluctuated between 1 1/8 and 1 3/8 miles after it was moved to Morris Park in 1890 when Jerome Park was condemned by the city to facilitate the construction of the New Croton Aqueduct and Jerome Park Reservoir to provide water for the city.

The Belmont transferred to the new Belmont Park, built by August Belmont Sr.'s son August Belmont II, in 1904 and was run at 1 3/8 miles until 1926, when Samuel D. Riddle's Crusader, son of Belmont-bred Man o' War, became the first Belmont winner at the 1 1/2-mile distance that has since become sacrosanct.

In Crusader's era, there were scores of other prestigious American races at 1 1/2 miles and beyond, but as the emphasis in American racing shifted inexorably toward precocious speed after World War II, those races disappeared, were reduced in distance, or transformed into turf races one by one. Since the American Jockey Club, founded by August Belmont II and Leonard Jerome, among others, abandoned its historic principals in pursuit of perceived relevance for its namesake race, the Jockey Club Gold Cup (G1), and reduced its distance to 1 1/4 miles in 1990, the Belmont has stood alone as America's only 1 1/2-mile Grade 1 stakes on dirt.

That uniqueness makes the Belmont more valuable than ever to the American racing industry in the current global racing environment. As various supporters of the move to ban race-day medications have correctly pointed out, the rest of the world, particularly Europeans, see American racing as increasingly irrelevant, primarily because medications allow horses who otherwise might not be able to compete to win top-level races.

Distance is also a factor in those perceptions, however. The rest of the world still reveres horses that can beat the best at distances from the 1 1/2 miles of the Epsom Derby and most other Derby equivalents around the world to the two miles of Australia's greatest race, the Emirates Melbourne Cup (Aus-G1).

It is an exquisite bit of irony that an American-bred horse named Americain won the 2010 Melbourne Cup. His sire, Dynaformer, trained by one of the principal critics of the Belmont's distance, D. Wayne Lukas, won at 1 1/2 miles, and is one of only a very few American sires foreign buyers might expect to sire a major winner over that distance. Dynaformer's daughter, Blue Bunting, winner of the 2011 Qipco One Thousand Guineas (Eng-G1), is one of the favorites for the 1 1/2-mile Epsom Oaks (Eng-G1).

Dynaformer, though, is 26 years old. Who will succeed him as a potential sire of European Derby winners when he is gone? Why should Europeans come to America to buy potential Derby winners if we have no stallions capable of producing them?

So, the next time someone mocks the distance of the Belmont stakes or calls it a “marathon” (please!), tell them, no, it is a feature, not a bug.

Memories of Pimlico

(First published in Thoroughbred Times Today on May 20, 2011)

I first visited Pimlico Race Course in the spring of 1969, while attending graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. Two weeks previously, Braulio Baeza on Arts and Letters had allowed Bill Hartack on Majestic Prince to get first run on him in the Kentucky Derby and beaten him a neck.

Arts and Letters was drawn outside Majestic Prince in the Preakness, so Baeza's and trainer Elliott Burch's plan for the Preakness was to stay lapped on him and not let Majestic Prince get away. That plan fell apart in the first strides when Al Hattab swerved into the *Ribot colt, knocking him further behind than in the Derby.

Arts and Letters again rallied determinedly in the stretch, but still fell a head short at the wire. The Rokeby Stable colt got his revenge three weeks later in the Belmont Stakes, and raced on undefeated through the rest of the year to earn Horse of the Year, but my first experience of the Preakness was not a happy one.

Pimlico in 1969 was a rather ramshackle old place. The historic Member's Clubhouse had burned three years previously and the Maryland Jockey Club was still two years away from remodeling the grandstand.

My third trip to the Preakness (I saw Personality win in 1970 as well) in 1995 was no better, if not worse. Minutes after pulling into the parking lot of the motel that Thoroughbred Times's Los Angeles-based travel agent had chosen, I was mugged at gunpoint before I could get my room door unlocked. Not a good way to begin Preakness week.

Three years later, things got even tougher when an overloaded electrical transformer at the track exploded, blacking out most of the grandstand, including the press box. I am all for exercise and physical fitness, but sprinting up and down four flights of stairs between races is not my idea of fun. Even before that potentially disastrous incident 13 years ago, many critics had pointed out that the ancient, dilapidated grandstand needed to be bulldozed and replaced. Cosmetics aside, not much has been done since.

I must admit, though, that my most recent (and quite possibly last) visit in 2005 to the rather disheveled old lady on Park Heights Avenue made up for some of the indignities Pimlico has visited upon me. Seeing Afleet Alex pick himself up off his knees at the top of the stretch and win the Preakness by seven lengths remains one of the most remarkable displays of agility, ability, and determination I have ever seen.

It is a short drive along Northern Parkway from the Hopkins campus in the Homewood area of Baltimore to Pimlico, but even in 1969 the two neighborhoods were worlds apart. Then as now, Homewood is stately, tree-sheltered homes for the upper-middle class; Pimlico is bordered by working-class apartment buildings and businesses. Kegasus is not really that out of place in the Pimlico neighborhood.

Like the rest of the world, Baltimore itself is a far different place in 2011 than it was in 1969. The Inner Harbor area, now home to museums, upscale shops, and the ESPN Zone was then known as “the Block”, an ominous euphemism for an area dominated by mob-owned strip joints and bars.

If the Block was not a place that a naïve farm boy from Tennessee was likely to visit, perhaps Pimlico was only slightly more probable for a kid who had not yet decided what to do with his life. Only a couple of hours away in Upperville, Virginia, though, was Rokeby Stud, Paul Mellon's idyllic estate where Arts and Letters and a host of other top racehorses had been born and raised.

If Pimlico was not quite charming and classy enough to lure a young, romantic idealist away from the halls of academe, Rokeby was. The dreams born of visits to Rokeby and Pimlico live on in the heart of this 64-year-old curmudgeon.

In the spring an old man's fancy still turns to Black-Eyed Susans. The old lady in Baltimore is in need of something much more than a face lift, but she is worth saving. If only we can find the will and the way to do it.

Drink up!

It's been a long time between drinks here at the Pedigree Curmudgeon. Those of you who read Thoroughbred Times Today will be aware that my workload there increased from one column a week on a pedigree or auction to two every week, a pedigree (occasionally sale) column on Tuesday and a commentary piece on Friday.

What I have found is that I cover the subjects I used to write about on this blog (and more) in the Friday commentary. The increased workload also reduces my motivation to post here because I'm an old curmudgeon who's supposed to be mostly retired, and I only want to do so much of anything that resembles work. This may be fun sometimes, but it sure feels like work too.

At the same time I do not want to let this blog die. There may well be subjects I do not want to talk about in TT Today that I talk about here at some point. Or not....who knows?

In the meantime, I plan to post some of those Today pieces here, a day or two after they appear in Today. Let me know if you think this is a waste, or something worthwhile.

So here goes....my pedigree story on Animal Kingdom, winner of the 137th Kentucky Derby. And perhaps I'll have some follow up comments once I get the hang of this thing again.

(Previously published in the May 10 edition of Thoroughbred Times Today)

Turf pedigree comes up roses in the Derby

Animal Kingdom is bred for the turf but proves a superior runner on dirt

by John P. Sparkman

It would be difficult to write a more turf-oriented pedigree than that of 2011 Kentucky Derby (G1) winner Animal Kingdom. In the first three generations of his pedigree, only two horses, his sire Leroidesanimaux (Brz) and Bubble Company (Fr), dam of Leroidesanimaux's sire Candy Stripes, even ran on dirt, and neither won. And yet, in his first start on dirt, Animal Kingdom blew away the field in the final eighth of the Derby.

Only two horses in the fourth generation of Animal Kingdom's pedigree, his great-great grandsire Red God and Navajo Princess, dam of Dancing Brave, the sire of Animal Kingdom's second dam, won on dirt. That did not stop Animal Kingdom from winning the first jewel of the American Triple Crown on May 7.

Animal Kingdom is from the second crop of 2005 champion turf male Leroidesanimaux, whose defeat in the 2005 Breeders' Cup Mile (G1) by Artie Schiller ended an eight-race win streak that stretched over two racing seasons. Winner of one of three starts and placed in the Grande Premio Associacao Brasileira de Criadores e Proprietarios de Cavalo de Corrida (Brz-G1) in his native Brazil, he lost his first North American start, before sweeping all before him for the next eighteen months. That streak included wins in the 2004 Citation (G1), Inglewood (G3), and Morvich (G3) Handicaps, and the '05 Atto Mile (Can-G1), Frank E. Kilroe Mile Handicap (G1), and Fourstardave Handicap (G2).

A half-brother to Brazilian Group 1 winner Uapybo, by Blush Rambler, out of a half sister to the dams of leading French sire Dansili and Grade 1 or Group 1 winners Banks Hill (GB), Cacique (Ire), Champs Elysees (GB), Heat Haze (GB), Intercontinental (GB), and Promising Lead (GB), Leroidesanimaux retired to Richard and Audrey Haisfield's Stonewall Stud at a fee of $30,000 in 2006. A lengthy, handsome, correct horse very much in the mold of his line-founding grandsire Blushing Groom (Fr), Leroidesanimaux's stud career may have been hampered by the financial difficulties Stonewall encountered. Leroidesanimaux transferred to Stonewall's Ocala, Florida farm for the 2011 season, where he stands for a fee of $7,500.

Animal Kingdom is his third stakes winner and third graded winner from 140 foals age three and up, following multiple Grade 2 winner Always a Princess (out of Gabriellina Giof [GB], by Ashkalani) and Grade 3 winner Leroy's Dynameaux (Dyna Peak, by Dynaformer).

Animal Kingdom is the first foal of his dam, Dalicia (Ger), by the great German racehorse and sire Acatenango, a mare whose pedigree is German or Hungarian for nine generations. Bred in Germany by Carlton Consultants Ltd., Dalicia won only three of 21 starts, but one of those three wins came in the 2005 Preis der Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe (Ger-G3), where she beat multiple Group 1 winner Soldier Hollow by two lengths over 2,000 meters (9.96 furlongs). Imported to America by Team Valor and the Haisfields's Nevertell Racing Stable, Dalicia won one of five starts, a ten-furlong optional claimer over Santa Anita's turf course.

Dalicia is a full sister to Darwinia, dam of Daveron (Ger), by Black Sam Bellamy, winner of the Beaugay Stakes (G3) at Belmont Park on Derby day. Dalicia's dam Dynamis, by Dancing Brave, is half sister to Henckel Rennen (Ger-G2) (German One Thousand Guineas) winner Diacada, by Cadeaux Genereux), German highweight Desidera, by Shaadi, and stakes winner Diable, by Big Shuffle, from a family that has been producing top Central European stakes winners for 100 years.

Animal Kingdom is inbred 4x4 to Lyphard, with an inbreeding coefficient of 0.88%. Although his pedigree is basically an outcross, he is, in theory, inbred for ability on the turf.

That did not slow him down in the 2011 Kentucky Derby.

Travel is broadening

Travel to foreign lands is supposed to be broadening. Exposure to the way other countries, other cultures do things can give one new perspectives on our own habits and unconscious assumptions.

In the contemporary world, though, travel can also be sickening. It would be unfair to blame American Airlines and the whole US air travel system for the horrible head and chest cold I developed a few days after a Boschean trip back from my rather wonderful visit to Uruguay, but what the hell? It surely wasn't my fault that what should have been a 14-hour trip turned into a 36 hour ordeal.

Nine hours in the air from Montevideo trapped in the middle seat of a row is bad enough, but when the plane could not land in Miami because of fog and was diverted to Orlando, it turned a bearable experience into a visit to one of the inner rings of Dante's Inferno. U.S. customs will not allow even U.S. citizens to enter a different port than the one designated, so we had to sit on the tarmac in Orlando for 3 hours (breaking all kinds of FAA rules, of course), return to Miami once that airport opened, and then face the sheer, chaotic hell of trying to re-book flights at the same time half a dozen other similarly delayed flights were doing the same. When I noticed while standing in line that American had exactly one person working on re-booking a line that already numbered more than 100 and would grow to at least 500 or so, I decided it was time to punt. I took a room in a hotel, booked a flight for the next morning from there, and called it a day.

Some of my impressions of Uruguay and the broader insights from my trip are included in the link at right titled Uruguay postcards, which will take you to a PDF compilation of my daily reports from Montevideo and other sites, if you did not already see those ruminations when originally published in Thoroughbred Times Today. (I've also added links to my recent Bloodstock Topics articles in the Thoroughbred Times print edition on the production records of Great racemares and Hall of Fame male racehorses, if you didn't see those.)

The wonderful folks in Uruguay invited me down because they were interested in a) the publicity I could offer their racing and breeding program, and b) my observations on what they might be able to do better. As you'll see in the postcards, I was more than happy to do both.

Uruguay is a small, vibrant, mostly rural country with a very different problem set than our own. Even in Montevideo, a sprawling city of 1.3-million people, the people still feel a connection to the land that our city dwellers lost long ago. They know where their meat and vegetables come from, unlike some of our city school children who think they come from Kroger or Wal-Mart.

The Gaucho heritage is still much more alive than America's frontier cowboy myth, which has mostly disappeared from the public consciousness. Outside Montevideo, the country feels vast and empty, with herds of cattle grazing over endless, rolling fields. Uruguayans still know what a horse is and what it means to their lives. Americans, as a rule, do not.

What Uruguay does not have as a racing country is a large number of very wealthy individuals who are interested in horse racing and willing to invest the large sums necessary to make the country a real player on the world stage. With a population of only about 3.5-million, 1% of that of the United States, there simply is no critical mass of investment to make the breeding industry take off. Barring Uruguay's version of Sheikh Mohammed injecting serious capital, it is hard to see much change in the near future.

Uruguay does have a world-class racecourse in Hipodromo Nacional de Maronas. The physical plant's lovely 19th century style has been beautifully, stylishly updated by Hipica Rioplatense and the racecourse itself is beautifully laid out, with a demanding home straightaway of almost three furlongs. It is a long way from that final turn to the finish line, a distance that requires both courage and stamina to win a race.

Despite the arduous and stressful trip home, I would do it all again. The people are warm and engaging, working hard to make their world as a whole better. Sadly, that is not always the feeling one gets from within the American racing industry where turf wars remain all too common.

Travel is broadening.

Rio de la Plata

We are not scheduled to go to Hipodromo Nacional de Maronas until 3:00 pm today, so I decided to walk down to the beach this morning and dip my toe into the Rio de la Plata. The beach I wanted to walk to turned out to be a good bit further than I thought--distances perceived when you're being driven along in a car can be deceiving. But I found a place where I could wade out over slippery rocks to sit on a rock and let the muddy waters lap over me.

The Rio de la Plata is an estuary formed by the confluence of the Parana and Uruguay rivers which join just north west of Buenos Aires. Those two rivers drain most of Southern Brazil, Paraguay, Northern Argentina and part of Bolivia, so the waters are full of silt. A shoal called the Barrio del Indio near Montevideo means that this is about as far as the muddy water normally extends before sinking under the sea water. Yesterday the water was blue at Montevideo; today it is brown.

January 6 is a national holiday in Uruguay known as Three Kings Day after the biblical story. Because the three kings brought gifts, kids get gifts just like Christmas. Must be nice to have two Christmases within two weeks of each other. I had thought about exploring the Ciudad Vieja this morning but after a very late night last night the fact that many shops would be closed made it too tempting to stay closer to the hotel.

The pre-race cocktail party last night was similar to a Breeders' Cup or Triple Crown race media party, though, of course, smaller. The Breeders' Cup has never matched the setting of the Maronas party though, since it was in a restaurant/bar on a point about five miles east of Montevideo. The spit of land sticks far enough out into the Rio de la Plata that the lights of Montevideo were spread out like a string of stars on the night sky.

The river is 60 miles wide here at Montevideo and beyond stretches the deep blue sea.

Such grandeur gives one perspective.

Let's go racing!

Horse of the Year or Horse of the Decade

Is Zenyatta the Horse of the Year, the Horse of the Decade? Or both?

To this observer that is the only remaining question in the ongoing debate between Blame and Zenyatta proponents for 2010 Horse of the Year. Think about it....no, seriously. Project yourself, say 10 years into the future, and ask yourself who will be remembered as Horse of the Decade for the first ten years of the 2000s.

I'm certain there are readers who will disagree, but I cannot see how it can be any horse but Zenyatta for Horse of the Decade. She will be the only significant horse to lose only one race, the only winner of 19 straight, the only mythic equine figure of the decade, the only horse the public remembers from the "naughty noughts".

The other possible candidates? Maybe Tiznow, who did become a two-time Breeders' Cup Classic winner in the first year of the decade. Curlin was Horse of the Year twice, but tailed off rather markedly after his return from Dubai. Ghostzapper made the speed boys shiver but did not race very often, and his apparent belly flop at stud will hurt him in the past's rear-view mirror, justified or not. How can any of that compare to winning the first 19 of 20 starts and the mythic status that streak acquired? What other American-based horse really did much worth remembering for more than one season? What other horse evoked comparisons to the all-time greats of the sport?

I'm sure I'm missing someone and you readers will remind me, but I can't come up with any other really deserving candidates. The classic 3-year-olds all flubbed their lines at one time or the other. Rachel Alexandra was brilliant for one season against a bad crop of 3-year-old colts and an almost non-existent older male division. The American grass horses have become a joke. Azeri also won three consecutive older mare titles, but no one except possibly Michael Paulson really thinks she should be compared to Ruffian.

So how can a horse clearly be the Horse of the Decade and not be voted Horse of the Year even one of those years? Well, it could happen. The speed figure believers have never liked her, the anti-synthetic crowd doesn't like her (despite the fact that she ran probably her three best races in her only starts on dirt), and there is still a strong Eastern bias to the voting base. I suspect, though, that the strongest opposition comes from the folks who are saying the award should go to the horse who won the biggest race of the year against the best field of the year. Of course, many of those are the same folks who voted for Rachel Alexandra last year, ignoring the obvious fact that it was Zenyatta who won the biggest race against the best field last year. Go figure.

Intelligent, honorable people can certainly disagree, and I cast no aspersions on anyone else's opinion. But for me, Zenyatta cannot be Horse of the Decade and not be Horse of the Year. She's earned it.

Dr. Binns and Mr. Morris

Just finished reading Matt Binns's and Tony Morris's Thoroughbbred Breeding: Pedigree theories and the science of genetics, and for all my friends who asked, yes, it is worth the time and money. (You can order it at http://www.amazon.com/Thoroughbred-Breeding-Pedigree-Theories-Genetics/dp/0851319351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287774548&sr=8-1)

The first half of the book is Tony's and serves as a brief history of the development of the Thoroughbred and the concomitant development of documentation and commentary on the breed. I've tried to cover some of this same ground in various articles and, to a lesser extent, my book Foundation Mares, but Tony has a better library and better sources available and does a much better job than I ever could. Tony has never had much time for pedigree theories that are not backed by science--appropriately so--so his dismissal of such things as Bruce Lowe and dosage are no surprise.

One of the surprising revelations of Tony's exposition, though is how little development there was--at least in print--of anything that could reasonably be called a breeding theory before the appearance of the work of Bruce Lowe in Australia and England (via William Allison) and Hermann Goos and J.P. Frentzel in Germany in the 1890s. It certainly appears that Allison was really the first commentator to push a particular mating method in print (Lowe's crackpot theories) and, since he was a bloodstock agent, doubtless advise breeders on matings (He was also part owner of a stud). Parenthetically, Allison was the man who helped choose the English broodmares bought as the basis for the studs of seminal American breeders James R. Keene, August Belmont II and Samuel D. Riddle/Walter Jeffords. It is pretty clear, however, from looking at Keene's pedigrees that his manager/brother-in-law Maj. Foxhall Daingerfield, paid no attention to Allison's/Lowe's breeding theories. Furthermore, the success of Belmont and Riddle/Jeffords was dependent almost entirely on Fair Play and his son Man o' War.

The most interesting bit of new knowledge for me in Tony's chapters is the fact that research on coat color through the pages of the General Stud Book actually played an important role in the early 1900s in verifying and popularizing Mendel's work.

Tony's repeated theme, though, is that, up until very recently indeed, none of the theories promoted to aid breeders in producing better racehorses had any real scientific basis, and precious few even attempted to establish some kind of statistical validity.

Professor Binns, a molecular biologist by training who has since started his own equine genetic testing service in partnership with David Lambert, DVM, takes over for the second half of the book. Necessarily, he begins by covering the much-trod ground of basic Mendelian genetics, but his chapters get much more interesting when he moves on to more complex variations on the basic Mendelian themes.

Matt is actually quite gentle in deconstructing theories such as the X-factor and the broodmare sire effect. In addition to pointing out that there is no basis in current scientific knowledge for such simplistic theories, he allows the possibility that future research might salvage some vestige of those and other ideas. That's what a true scientist does--lay out what is known about a subject and point out the probable verdict on a current theory, according to that research, but acknowledge that not enough is known to say precisely what the truth might be (unless, of course, there is sufficient knowledge!).

Matt's half of the book raises several questions in my mind that I plan to discuss with him, once I've followed those loose ends as far as my limited knowledge allows, but I learned a lot from his chapters, and was reminded of other bits of genetic fact that had slipped away over the years.

Matt's half does suffer somewhat from what has become the bane of the equine author--the almost two-year gap between the time he finished writing and the actual appearance of the book in the shop window. (The same thing happened with the publication of Foundation Mares.) On the last page of the book, obviously at the last possible second before publication, he inserted a brief reference to Emmeline Hill, et.al.'s publication of their work on the Myostatin gene related to distance preferences in racehorses. Much else, including Matt's own research and the launching of his testing service, has happened in equine genetics since he wrote his chapters. There are now at least five different companies offering genetic tests of various descriptions, and other than the reference to Hill's paper, none of that appears in Thoroughbred Breeding: Pedigree theories and the science of genetics.

I know that many pedigree pundits and advisors have been anxious that Tony's and Matt's book would be essentially a dismissal of all pedigree theories and research except genetics. Though some may read it that way, that clearly is not the purpose. Matt in particular clearly sees his science as an adjunct to knowledge of pedigree and conformation, not a replacement.

Read it for yourself and let me know what you think.

Best ever racemares

Frank Mitchell has started an interesting debate over on his Bloodstock in the Bluegrass blog at http://fmitchell07.wordpress.com/ by asking his readers who were the greatest racemares of the last 100 years. Naturally most of the responses suffer from the recency effect. Only curmudgeons seem to remember, or be very much interested in, the achievements of what to others is the distant past.

It's an interesting question, though, worth some thought, and a quick look back through the records to remind even this old head of the glories of the past. In truth though, it is almost certainly entirely just to discount the achievements of virtually all of the fillies and mares that raced before World War II. American racehorses were quite simply better after the importation of European stallions and mares reached critical mass in the aftermath of the war. It seems pretty clear that the American racehorse reached something of an apotheosis in the 1960s and '70s, and everything since then must be compared to those horses. The fact that those decades happen to coincide with this old curmudgeon's impressionable teens and 20s has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So what does your list look like? Here's mine, with some semi-credible attempts at justification.

1. Ruffian....Ran too fast too many times not to be at or near the top.

2. Zenyatta....19 for 19....What else is there to say? (Yeah I know, there are plenty who quibble)

3. Dark Mirage...800 pound monster won 10 straight @3 and 4, many by huge margins

4. Gallant Bloom....Beat Shuvee 5 out of 6, 11 straight wins, vastly underrated even in her era

5. Allez France...Raced only once in U.S. when past her best, but beat Dahlia 5 for 5, beat colts 8 times in Europe

6. Personal Ensign...13 for 13, but had to be carefully handled because of soundness and thus difficult to evaluate fairly

7. Dahlia....only 15 for 48, but raced on when well past her best...Beat top colts silly in Europe 5 times, and 4 times in America.

8. Desert Vixen....9 for 11 at 3 in '73...admittedly a sentimental favorite. Led Dahlia a merry chase in D.C. International over distance way too far and almost held on. Great filly.

9. Rachel Alexandra....Sorry folks, generally overrated. Beat a bad bunch of colts, just like any of the fillies rated above her here would have.

10. Tosmah...17 for 22 at 2 and 3, beat colts in Arlington Classic

11. (why stop at 10?) Go for Wand...Another sentimental choice, but 10 for 12 before dying on the lead is pretty damned good.

12. Shuvee...Couldn't beat Gallant Bloom, but beat everything else after GB retired.

13. Bayakoa...16 for 21 and absolutely lethal at 5 and 6 when at her best.

That's my lucky 13. Have at it.

Natural beauty

Nature, in her carefree way, has cast aside her most colorful autumnal cloak over the hills of north central Tennessee and south central Kentucky. That made the drive north from my haven on the banks of the Caney Fork to Lexington last Sunday for the Pedigree and Genetics Symposium on Monday more pleasurable than usual.

I prefer to drive early in the morning, so a gorgeous Sunday afternoon was free for first looks at some new stallions.

Desert Party is the standout on conformation among the three young horses I saw at Darley. He has grown into exactly the perfectly balanced, handsome, miler type one would have hoped when he topped the Fasig-Tipton Calder sale three years ago. There were times during his 10-6-1-0 racing career when the Street Cry colt looked like a G1 caliber horse, but he never stayed good enough or sound enough long enough to prove it. But he looks the part.

Street Boss looks exactly like what he was, a high-class sprinter. He's more heavily muscled than Desert Party, which he should be, and, aside from his chestnut coat, looks more like his sire. Thankfully he's more correct than Street Cry, but most of his sire's good ones are, of course. That's the way it works.

Midshipman is still in the process of letting down. He's a big, attractive horse, with the size and shoulder that Unbridled's Song passes on so consistently, but also managed only the brief racing career that has become all too frequent with sons of his sire. I loved Unbridled's Song from the time I saw him stroll from his stall in the Derry Meeting barn at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale, but too many of his good offspring do not last past the spring of their three-year-old year. Midshipman might be a little light boned for his size, but otherwise has no obvious flaws. He just needs to fill out into a stallion.

From Darley I motored down to Nicholasville to Taylor Made.

I had discovered I didn't have a good picture of Unbridled's Song, so I snapped him, as well as his son Old Fashioned. The latter is probably the best-looking son of Unbridled's Song I've seen. Pretty correct, luckily not as big as his sire, and beautifully balanced. He was better than I expected. Old Fashioned raced even fewer times than Midshipman, but he is pretty clearly a Grade 1 talent for a Grade 2 price.

Eskendereya has a similar 6-4-1-0 record to Old Fashioned, and has a terrific body. Big shoulder, long barrel, nice long hip, but he's nowhere near as correct. He's offset and rotates both front legs, and it's easy to see why he had tendon problems. He's a very attractive horse, but you'd have to be careful what you breed to him.

Which, come to think of it, is true for just about any stallion you look at.

Afternoon session Pedigree and Genetics Symposium

2:50 pm

Matthew Binns will finish off the presentations

Begins by saying pedigree is genetics. Matthew theme is going to be very similar to his recent book with Tony Morris, which attempts to debunk most pedigree theories.

Matthew veered more toward his own research that the Genetic Edge sells...here's a brief summary:

Whole genome study looked at racing performance, distance, surface and height. Developed a scoring system of grades ABCD for racing performance and established the incidence of the grades at sales. Markers include a female-specific SNP. They also found a marker that is specific to Mr. Prospector horses, a SNP that's only present in the good Mr. P horses, and not in the non elite horses.

Data predicts that you can eliminate 50% of individuals on a short list at sales and retain 75% of the GSWs. Blind test found the 6 GSWs hidden among 55 moderate horses. Population is10% As, 40% Bs 40% Cs 10% Ds

Tested 27 G1 sprinters and all were homozygous for sprint genotype. But several horses who won the Kentucky Derby were homozygous sprinters. Race pace is crucial in American racing.

There are multiple SNPs strongly associated with different surfaces, some associated with muscle enzymes.

Matthew ends with perhaps the most appropriate comment of the day:

This is real and it's coming, and we hope that you will embrace it.

1:50 pm

Emmeline Hill of Equinome up next.

Heritability of racing ability is somewhere between 35% and 55%, but heritability of best racing distance is much more heritable, according to an Australian study, about 94%.

Myostatin is a negative regulator of muscle mass....it controls the development of muscles. Mutation in myostatin leads to massive muscling. Knowledge of that fact led to looking for polymorphisms in the horse myostatin gene. Found a polymorphism represented by the base pairs C and T. Found no differences in class of horses carrying the three possible combinations (CT, CC, TT), but differences in best winning distance were found.

Basically Emmeline is going over her original study that was published in January.

Almost all quarter horses are CCs, almost all Egyptian Arabians are TTs. Thoroughbreds, elite graded stakes winning horses, show what you would expect, more CTs than anything else, your basic normal distribution, slightly skewed in favor of CCs. National hunt (steeplechase) winners on the other hand are heavily skewed toward TTs, but no CCs at all.

New Equinome research published today, new study indicates that the myostatin gene is the most powerful indicator of best race distance. Says Equinome's marker performs 15 times better than any other marker in predicting best racing distance.

What genes are responding to exercise. Certain genes activity are significantly enhanced after exercise. The response increases over time as a result of training. It prepares the system to be able to be better able to respond to exercise.

Over 5k genes present in skeletal muscle. After year of training 16 genes increased activity and 58 decreased, The gene that changed the most was myostatin. Decreased its activity over 4 times.

1:10 pm

Bob Fierro of Datatrack International up next. Bob is threatening to use me as an illustration of one of his points. I dread to think what it might be. Should I run? Knowing Bob, yes.

I got to be Alydar (a long legged stride horse), Jay Kilgore was Danzig (power), Alan Porter (light weight long distance runner), and Byron Rogers (the balanced athlete, in his case a triathlete). Who knew.

Bob shows that the distribution of phenotypes of classic winners and leading sires has changed drastically since 1970s. Breed has gotten larger, lighter, more powerful, and not as balanced as they used to be and much less consistent. 2000s starting to be a little more consistent.

Secretariat turns out to be a critical horse in terms of biomechanics....His phenotype helps pull the breed back toward balance, through horses like A.P. Indy, Storm Cat, and Gone West.

Live blogging the Pedigree and Genetics Symposium

Lunch Break....I'll start a new blog entry for the afternoon.

11:40 a.m.

Tamariello discusses epistasis and epigenetics, both of which complicate the simple DNA approach. Just because you have a particular gene, it doesn't necessarily drive the phenotype. The control of the expression of genes into proteins that actually govern the body. Just by looking at the gene sequence alone, you can't predict everything.

Tamariello's company screens for:

Two muscle-related genes

Two behavior genes

Two bone development genes and

One energy-related gene

plus Whole genome screening and other higher-level screening.

11:20 a.m.

Tamariello is going over basic genetic biology that everybody in the crowd should already know. Apologetic for perhaps talking down to the audience, but still that's what he's doing. Good refresher course for those too far removed from Biology 101 I suppose.

Once through with the basics, he moves on to more specific stuff related to the Thoroughbred.

Muscle Gene 1, a gene linked to muscle function. Two alleles, racing and non-racing. Thoroughbred breeders have bred over centuries to have 2 copies of the racing allele, but there is a sub-population that is not homozygous. Heterozygous can be successful, but homozygous recessive (non-racing) are too slow to even make it to the track. This is the genotype found in most draft horses. Having 2 copies of the racing alleles, however, does not make it a fast horse.

11:00 a.m.

Prof. Steve Tamariello up next, hopefully will relate Jamie MacLeod's work more directly to the Thoroughbreds.

10:40 a.m.

Jamie's final comments may ease the worries of certain individuals in the industry:

"Equine genomics will enhance and enable good horsemanship, not compete with it Genomics in no way threatens the importance and artistry of horsemanship."

10:30 a.m.

Jamie gave a detailed explanation of how SNPs (Single Nucelotide Polymorphisms) work, which is much too complicated to try to explain on the fly. Look it up. But here's a summary of how they're used.

"What we're tyring to do is localize what region in the genome has an association with the trait you're studying. We know where in the genome where each SNP is located, know the frequency of each allele in the population. Then we compare the frequency of alleles in the population as a whole to the population with the trait you're studying.

When you find differences, that shows theres' something of interest on that particular chromosome at that particular position. Then look back at the genome map and see what genes are in that region.

10:00 a.m.

Dr. Jamie MacLeod of UK and the Gluck up next on the Equine Genome project. His brief is to give context and background for the geneticists coming up later.

Highlights of the development of the current technology for genetic research include:

The horse was added to the USDA Animal Genome Mapping project in 1996. The Human Genome project extended from 1990—2003. That gave all of animal sciences a blueprint for the genome but also provided new technology for the sequencing of other genomes, including the horse.

NIH decided they could learn additional information by sequincing the genomes of other species to compare the human genome to that of other species. The horse community convinced the NIH to select the horse to sequence among equids, because of the community of scientists working on horse genetics, there were already several well-developed genome maps; there are many biomedical aspects of horse that relate to human health, for example at the elite athlete level; veterinary medical applications; and the existence of deep pedigrees to study the inheritance of traits.

The proposal was submited to NHGRI in 2005. Sent samples to the Broad Institute in November 2005. NIH looked for a highly inbred horse, because of the way DNA is sequenced. With a highly inbred individual, the two halves are more similar, so easier for the computer program to put it together. A Thoroughbred mare named Twilight was chosen. Sequencing started in 2006 and completed fall 2007.

9:40 a.m.

Alan concludes with a look forward:

"We're anticipating that genetic research will reinforce and validate much of the analysis that we see in Thoroughbred pedigrees."

"Relying solely on pedigree is foolhardy, but likewise so is dismissal of pedigree as unimportant. Pedigree will continue to be an important eliminating criteria.Maybe 5-10 years away we're going to see a change in what pedigree actually means. What we're seeing with genetics is that though a mare might be an Easy Goer mare, she has very little of Easy Goer's good genes. Genetics can tell us what has actually been passed on instead of just a theoretical assumption and we might breed two mares by the same sire entirely differently."

Question time!

9:30 a.m.

Alan is basically attempting to cover both the historical background of Thoroughbred research and provide a frame for the other speakers later in the day. Very appropriate way to begin the symposium.

In relating his own personal history, Alan had the good grace to acknowledge the contributions of his late rival Jack Werk, though he noted that they had "philosophical differences." That was something of an understatement!

The heart of his talk can be summed up by this approximate quote (hey I can only type so fast!):

"In terms of pedigree research in my time in the industry we've gone from split pedigree books and doing everything by hand to computer programs that access every horse in the population. Now everybody can have access to the data. What is now important is how to interpret the data."

Of course what came next was basically a sales pitch for Alan's and Byron's True Nicks program, but hey, that's why all the speakers are here. It's a capitalist country!

9:05 a.m.

Alan Porter will frame the day with a talk on the history of technology use in the Thoroughbred industry. Alan has been recommending matings for many prominent breeders for more than 25 years.

_______________

I will be live-blogging (more or less) the Pedigree and Genetics Symposium in Lexington today, so if you want to check in occasionally to see what's going on, this is the place. Don't know what my frequency will be, but it should be an interesting day with dueling geneticists!

Byron Rogers and Alan Porter at Pedigree Consultants expect a full room of 175 people. The scheduled speakers, in order, will be:

Alan Porter, Pedigree Consultants

Dr. James MacCleod, University of Kentucky, discussing the Equine Genome Project

Steve Tammariello, Thoroughgen LLC, SUNY Binghampton geneticist

Gary Falter, Jockey Club Informations Systems

Bob Fierro, Datatrack International, on the intersection of pedigree, biomechanics, and genetics

Prof. Emmeline Hill, Equinome, University College Dublin, on the Myostatin gene

Dr. Matthew Binns, Equigen LLC, the Genetic Edge, on breeding theories and modern genetics

See ya later!