Interesting article

I wonder does this mean Jim will stop running Galileos in sprints?!

More importantly I wonder if the gene make-up of active stallions will be published. Scary news for all those who think it's all about how you** your head at the sales whilst holding a pedigree book under your oxter.

The Irish Field reports this morning that 500 people attended the Equinome presentation at the ITBA Expo in Goffs yesterday. I was there and visited the Equinome stand afterwards. The full blurb is at http://www.equinome.com/

The scientific results seem reasonable, although it appears that the same results would have been obtained if every horse in the sample had been campaigned over a single distance throughout its career. I wonder would the results be as dramatic in Australia where individual horses race over a much wider range of distances than in these parts. There is no attempt to quantify in pounds or lengths how much better a horse is over its optimal distance than over sub-optimal distances.

The business plan was full of surprises. First, the EUR1,000 fee for a blood test seems very large. What percentage of the budget of a typical horse owner would this represent? What sort of profit margin has been added to the actual cost of doing the test? Second, the company will carry out the test on anonymous blood samples. Most academic scientists are desperate for real world data that they can use to test their theories, but obviously an anonymous blood sample is of no use for further research. Third, the test is not intended for punters.

With today's Irish Field also reporting that the Turf Club is working on a new suite of rules similar to the inside information regulations introduced by the BHA, Mr Egan et al must be trying to figure out how to stop connections from exploiting valuable genetic information about their horses which is not known to the scientists doing the anonymous blood tests, to their fellow punters, to bookmakers or to the handicapper. The present genetic findings may not be of major significance to the betting market, but who know what future research will turn up.