for Brigust1 ...

Racehorses are getting faster

BY ANDREW SCUTTS 12:31PM 24 JUN 2015

A NEW study from the University of Exeter has found racehorses are getting quicker - despite a general consensus among scientists and in the racing industry that racehorse speed has plateaued.

‘Racehorses are getting faster', by Patrick Sharman and Alastair J Wilson, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, says that it had appeared racehorse speeds were not improving and that previous studies concluded racehorses may have reached the limits of their abilities.

However, those studies analysed only the winning time of a small number of middle- and long-distance elite races and did not take factors like ground conditions into account.

Sharman and Wilson analysed data that gave a detailed overview of racehorse performance at the elite level since the mid-1800s, and at both the elite level and in the racehorse population as a whole since 1997.

The full data set of 616,084 race times run by 70,388 horses showed race-winning speeds have improved a lot since 1850, and that increases have been greatest in shorter races.

Data from 1997-2012 revealed that improvements in performance are ongoing, and continue to be driven largely by increases in speeds of sprinters, especially at the elite level.

The slower rate of contemporary improvement in speed over middle and long distances could indicate horses are reaching a performance limit at these distances or could suggest that breeders favour speed over endurance.

Sharman said: "There has been a general consensus over the last 30 years that horse speeds appeared to be stagnating. Our study shows this is not the case and, by using a much larger data set than previously analysed, we have revealed horses have been getting faster.

"Interestingly, both the historical and current rate of improvement is greatest over sprint distances. The challenge now is to find out whether this pattern of improvement has a genetic basis."

Results showed that historical improvement has not been linear. Rapid improvement occurred in the early 1900s and then again from 1975 to the early-1990s. The rapid improvement in the early 1900s has previously been attributed to an altered riding style, when jockeys assumed a crouched position and rode with shorter stirrups.

The rapid improvement through the 1970s and 1980s may be a result of jockeys adopting Lester Piggott's style of riding with further shortened stirrups.

However, increased commercialisation of breeding also occurred during this period and this rapid increase in speed may be due to genetic improvement.