The effort includes the usage of StrideSAFE, which uses sensors to analyze the gait of horses and can find early signs of problems that can be avoided and should keep a horse off the racetrack while it recovers. At the upcoming Keeneland spring meet, all starters will be wearing the StrideSAFE sensors.

“They're all wearing it when they race,” Brown said. “So, currently, the application is for every runner that competes at our meet will be carrying one of those sensors in the saddle towel. The idea is to use the technology and then to provide the information that can be used as the tool that then can kind of give direct feedback to the to the trainers and their veterinarians. The wearable technologies hold a lot of promise for us.”

When asked about synthetic surfaces, Brown said the goal for Keeneland is to make their main dirt track as safe as any synthetic track. He also discussed efforts to keep jockeys healthy, both mentally and physically.

“The University of Kentucky in conjunction with the UK health care professionals come here and help us on race day and then take metrics,” he said. “We're able to look at our riders and see from race one to race 11 how those riders are doing. And we've had really good engagement with the rider colony here about participating in those activities. They look at balance and reaction time and all those aspects sort of translate into safety. It's been really interesting to kind of look at the feedback that they've been able to get back from the riders and the types of things they are looking for.”

In our breeding spotlight section, we took a look at the Coolmore stallion Echo Town and the WinStar stallion Constitution.

Elsewhere on the podcast, which is also sponsored by the Pennsylvania Horse Breeders' Association, Coolmore, 1/ST Racing, West Point Thoroughbreds, WinStar, the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association and XBTV.com, the team of Randy Moss, Bill Finley and Zoe Cadman took a look back at the major races run last weekend, including the tour-de-force and redeeming victory turned in by Fierceness (City of Light) in the GI Curlin Florida Derby. They also looked ahead to the major races set to be run this weekend. Moss loves Impel (Quality Road) in the GI Ashland S. and Cadman loves Just F Y I (Justify) in the same race. That led to a friendly wager between the two.

For the podcast video, click here. For the audio version, click here.

The post Keeneland’s Dr. Stuart Brown Joins ‘TDN Writers’ Room’ Podcast appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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But for every good story there seemed to be 10 bad ones.

With the animal rights community and some portions of the media putting unrelenting pressure on the sport, there's never a good time to go through a rash of breakdowns, but for it to happen surrounding the running of the GI Kentucky Derby was bad timing at its worst. There were 12 deaths at Churchill Downs crammed into just a few weeks and it got so bad that racetrack management decided to pull the plug on the remainder of the meet and move everything to Ellis Park.

Then Saratoga happened. When New York Thunder (Nyquist) broke down strides before the wire in the GI H. Allen Jerkens Memorial S. the number of horse fatalities at the meet had soared to 12. It was a horrible sight to behold for a national television audience and the 48,292 in attendance. And it was a ghastly reminder of what happened three weeks earlier to Maple Leaf Mel (Cross Traffic) in the GI Test S. She, too, broke down right before the wire in a spill that was as ugly as it gets.

The Breeders' Cup was not immune to tragedy. Though no one was seriously injured on the day of the races, Geaux Rocket Ride (Candy Ride {Arg}) and broke down and had to be euthanized and Practical Move (Practical Joke) suffered an apparent heart attack and died, both while training for the GI Breeders' Cup Classic.

The fatalities obviously caught the attention of 60 Minutes, which, in November, aired a story that focused on the breakdowns and the sport's doping problems while casting a brutally negative light on the sport. Then we learned that we will get more of the same sometime in 2024. In December, FX, a subsidiary of Disney Entertainment, announced that there would be an upcoming documentary, “The New York Times Presents: Broken Horses,” which it said would examine “systemic issues, questionable practices and urgent calls for change that have shaken horse racing to its core.”

When it comes to the economics of the sport, there was more troubling news. Through November, handle was down nearly $500 million on the year or 4.39%. That means we are on our way to seeing the steepest declines in handle, outside of the COVID year of 2020, since 2011. Does that have anything to do with the computer-assisted wagering (CAW) players? Probably. They have tilted the pari-mutuel pools to a point where the regular horseplayer is getting killed and getting out.

In July, 1/ST Racing announced that Golden Gate Fields would be shutting down for good at the end of the year, throwing the Northern California circuit into chaos. The track got a reprieve, but a brief one. It is now scheduled to cease operations on June 11. That's when it will join Arlington Park, Calder, Hollywood Park, Bay Meadows and others that couldn't make it to the finish line. Some wonder whether Santa Anita, which sits on property that is estimated to be worth $1 billion, will someday join them.

Racing can't afford to have another year like this. Things need to change. While there are no magic bullets, here are what I believe are some practical and common sense solutions to some of the problems.

The sport needs to fully embrace StrideSAFE. StrideSAFE is a biometric sensor mechanism that slips into the saddle cloth to detect minute changes in a horses' gait at high speed. Those changes can, and often do, signal that a horse is in the early stages of having a problem that could lead to a fatal injury. The technology has been around since 2011 and, while it has been experimented with here and there, it remains largely absent from the backstretch of America's racetracks. Why? There's no doubt that widespread employment of StrideSAFE will cut down on the number of horses that break down and there's no excuse for the sport to continue to drag its feet when it comes to embracing the concept.

The CAW factor is a major issue that's not going to go away, no matter what harm it might be doing to the overall health of the sport. It has become an unmanageable runaway train, with these players betting so much money that no track is going to turn away their business. But some guardrails would help. More tracks need to do what NYRA has done. They have effectively closed the CAW players out of the win pool by no longer allowing them to place bets at the very last second. They have also been excluded from NYRA's Late Pick 5 and the Cross Country Pick 5.

The betting product also needs to be better and more geared toward the booming market that is made up of sports bettors. The sport has not been nearly aggressive enough when it comes to getting the on-line sports betting websites to start accepting bets on racing. To date, the only one that has been signed up is FanDuel. That also means adopting fixed-odds wagers, which are what the sports bettors know. Only Monmouth Park has gone down this road and two years after it was implemented in New Jersey the concept is limping along. No other tracks or states have tried fixed-odds betting and, in New Jersey, only the second-level tracks are available to the fixed odds bettors.

The takeout remains too high. With betting on a horse race often involving a rake of around 20%, the game is always going to have a tough time competing with other forms of gambling, where the effective takeout rate is lower. We're seeing some progress in this area, with a number of tracks lowering the takeout on horizontal wagers like the Pick Four and Pick Five. In 2023, Hawthorne took a major step in the right direction by lowering its takeout on win, place and show wagers to 12%. But we need a lot more of the same. With so much of purse money now coming from alternative sources like slot machines, there's no reason why tracks in places like New York and Kentucky can't at least experiment with reduced takeout rates.

Fix the Triple Crown. It needs it. The GI Preakness S. is no longer coveted by the sport's major trainers and has become a weak link in the Triple Crown. Everyone wants to run in the Derby and then they scramble, some pointing for the GI Belmont S., some ready to put their horses on the shelf until the big summer races. The 2022 Derby winner, Rich Strike (Keen Ice) passed on the Preakness and, this year, Derby winner Mage (Good Magic) was the only horse to go in the first two legs of the Triple Crown. The result is that the Preakness is less important than it has ever been and that only weakens the Triple Crown as a whole. When 1/ST floated the idea of running the Preakness four weeks after the Derby, NYRA reacted by announcing that it had no intention of moving the date of the Belmont. Yes, a Belmont run five weeks after the Derby works well for NYRA, but it needs to put its self interests aside and do what's best for the sport and shift the Belmont to late June or early July.

While we're at it, the purses for the Triple Crown races are too small. In this day and age, the $1.5-million purse for the Preakness is not going to motivate anyone to run. These are supposed to be the most important races in the sport and their purses should reflect as much. For all three races, the purses should be raised immediately to $3 million with the goal of eventually making them $5-million races.

These are things that can be done. Let's not let another year go by in which the sport embraces the status quo while the outlook for its future continues to get worse. The year 2024 is upon us, let it be the year where the sport takes much needed steps in the right direction.

The post The Week in Review: In 2024, the Sport Needs to Do Better appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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StrideSAFE is a biometric sensor mechanism that slips into the saddle cloth to detect minute changes in a horses's gait at high speed. Those changes can, and often do, signal that a horse is in the early stages of having a problem that could lead to a fatal injury. If the StrideSAFE data is made available to trainers and veterinarians, they can use it to make decisions that very well could save a horse's life.

To learn more about StrideSAFE, we brought in its CEO Dr. David Lambert for this week's TDN Writers' Room podcast presented by Keeneland to discuss how the technology works and what it can do to keep our horses safer. Lambert was the Green Group Guest of the week.

“We recognized early on that every horse has his own unique way of going,” Lambert said. “The sensors would pick up the same pattern for the same horse all the time. But if something were to go wrong with that horse, then that pattern changes and the sensors are able to pick that up. And so the preliminary work was to look at cases where we knew the horses had suffered a fatal injury and try to quantify the nature of the patterns that preceded the fatality. That was the basic research that we had to tidy up, and that's where we are now. We've got that pattern. We can identify each individual horse's style. We've got an elaborate model that can tell us when the changes that are happening in a horse's body are happening and putting them at greater risk of a fatal injury.”

How effective is it? Originally, horses were put into three categories, red, yellow and green. Red representing the horses at the highest risk of being injured, while green includes the ones at the least risk. They have since changed the categories with horses in category five the most likely to suffer a fatal injury.

“The animals that have the worst signal and are in category five, the worst data, are 300 times more likely to suffer a fatality than are the ones that get the normal signal,” Lambert said. “So we're able to quantify the amount of risk a horse is at once he's come out of a race. So the horse is wrong. Here he is. He's back at the barn. We get the results. And that horse, the data that horse showed us in that race tells us that he was he's now 300 times more likely to suffer a fatality. We give that to the trainer. This isn't an absolute.  But that horse is a seriously increased level of risk. And all we're asking the trainer to do is have a special look, bring your vets in, because the vets know where these fractures occur.”

While no one is doubting that StrideSAFE's information is accurate and can be vitally important, the racing industry has yet to embrace it. It has been used on a trial basis at some tracks, including the NYRA tracks, but is not yet in regular use at any track. Why?

“I think the answer to that is probably just human nature,” Lambert said. “When you come with any idea to a large group of people there are going to be those unusual folks who jump on it straight away. And then there'll be those who get used to it a little bit later. The establishment and the political players, if you like, the management level, are going to be slower still. They have a complex responsibility to the sport at large. They must be absolutely sure that something is valid before they allow it to happen. They can't go off, you know, with a knee jerk reaction jumping in and causing more harm than good. And then, of course, at the other end of that, there's always the soothsayers that just want no part of it.  And then all of them are bound by money. They might want to do it and can't afford it. So there's the whole spectrum of things that have, I think, been in evidence as we've tried to bring this forward. But slowly but surely we're making progress. People are getting on board. And I'm feeling pretty optimistic now that we're going to get this done.”

Elsewhere on the podcast, which is also sponsored byhttps://coolmore.com/https://lanesend.com/ the Pennsylvania Horse Breeders Association, Kentucky Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders,https://www.nyrabets.com/ WinStar Farm, XBTV.com, Stonestreet Farms, Lane's End andhttps://www.threechimneys.com/ West Point Thoroughbreds, the team of Zoe Cadman, Bill Finley and Randy Moss discussed the remarkable safety record at the recently concluded Del Mar meet where not a single horses broke down during the running of a race. The discussion included a look at a pair of 'TDN Rising Stars' who exited stakes races on closing weekend at Del Mar, where Tamara (Bolt d'Oro), the daughter of Hall of Famer Beholder (Henny Hughes), was a very impressive winner of the GI Del Mar Debutante. The team was not quite as bullish on the victory by Prince of Monaco (Speightstown), who was hard pressed to win the GI Del Mar Futurity as the 1-20 favorite. Randy Moss previewed the “Win and You're In” races to be held Saturday at Woodbine and will be broadcast by Moss and his team on NBC.

To watch the Writers' Room, click here. To view the show as a podcast, click here.

The post StrideSAFE CEO David Lambert Joins The TDN Writers’ Room Podcast appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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This means these horses passed before the eyes of a slew of experts–from the riders to the trainers to the veterinarians and the regulators–deemed among the best in the business. If they can't single out these horses before catastrophe happens, who can?

As the science around racehorse injury has evolved, the notion of a random “bad step” as the cause of catastrophic breakdowns has been largely debunked. Much cited since, a California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) led study from between 2011 and 2013 found that roughly 90% of Thoroughbreds that suffered catastrophic musculoskeletal injuries had pre-existing bone lesions near or at the site of the fracture.

The problem is, these lesions–abnormalities of the bone as it undergoes remodelling leaving that part of the skeleton vulnerable to fracture–can be a clinical nightmare to detect through the usual means. Think X-rays, nuclear scintigraphy, or just jogging the horse up and down a flat path. So, what to do?

Catastrophic injuries don't just happen overnight. The pathology underlying these events can occur over weeks, if not months, leading up to the fracture. Perversely, this is good news. There's a window for intervention, opening the door to a new breed of screening tools.

Much focus these past couple of years has been placed on a biometric sensor called StrideSAFE, which appears able to identify that small percentage of at-risk horses who are sound to the human eye. The New York State Gaming Commission equine medical director has called it “probably one of the most important contributions to the Thoroughbred horse industry that has ever been made.”

What's more, a new wave of imaging technologies are proving capable of diagnosing the underlying cause of these problems much earlier than ever before. Some of the industry's brightest minds say the trick to substantially reducing equine fatalities will be to standardize the combined use of these screening and diagnostic tools, bringing much needed objectivity to what–in identifying lameness–is all too often an exercise in subjectivity.

Easier said than done.

Logistical hurdles, significant costs and legitimate concerns about exactly how all this new information will be used present no small set of obstacles. But the imperative is clear, warn various industry leaders: If the sport doesn't act on these tools that it has at its disposal–and act quickly–racing could all too soon become an anachronism.

“This is the new frontier of racehorse safety,” said Jeff Blea, CHRB equine medical director. As an example, he highlighted Sleip, a smartphone app that has potential to work as a lameness diagnostic tool.

“StrideSAFE is the best screening tool we've ever had–clearly it's a lot more effective than the human eye,” said Warwick Bayly, professor of equine medicine in the department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences at Washington State University.

When it comes to integrating such screening tools into the daily furniture of the industry, Bayly was adamant. “We've got to do this.”

Positron Emission Tomography (MILE-PET) unit | courtesy Mathieu Spriet

“We cannot scan all horses to identify those four percent”

“It's got to the point where now it's more than a diagnostic tool,” said Mathieu Spriet, of the Positron Emission Tomography (MILE-PET) unit. “It is helpful as a clearance to race. It can help the regulatory vet by not scratching unnecessary horses. And it can help individual horses.”

The portable PET unit is the brainchild of Spriet, and has been a part of the diagnostic scene at Santa Anita since the end of 2019. Since then, nine other PET units have been distributed to Florida, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. In about one month, the University of Melbourne is scheduled to join the list.

In its relatively short life-span, evidence strongly suggests that the PET unit is especially useful in diagnosing the sorts of fetlock injuries–those actively brewing in the sesamoid bones, and the distal region of the cannon bone immediately above the fetlock–earlier and with greater accuracy than has been the case with more established imaging technologies.

Why is this important? The fetlock has long been the Thoroughbred racehorse's Achilles heel. Fetlock failures constituted in California nearly 60% of all musculoskeletal injuries that proved fatal during the 2018-2019 fiscal year.

In this study, a team of experts examined the results of 33 horses imaged using both PET and nuclear scintigraphy. The researchers agreed on the results for the PET more frequently than for nuclear scintigraphy. Indeed, they detected potential sesamoid bone problems in 22.2% of limbs imaged with PET, but only 6.9% of limbs imaged with scintigraphy.

In another study of 25 racehorses, 88% of the PET scans performed six weeks apart identified the same problem areas in the fetlock, demonstrating the technology's reliability. In all, 65% of the fetlocks examined demonstrated improvement during a 12-week rest period from racing.

But when it comes to the bête noire of horse racing–those at-risk runners who show no clinical signs of lameness–the study with perhaps the most significance concerns the 72 “normal” horses chosen to undergo PET scans of all four fetlocks at Golden Gate Fields, Santa Anita and Fair Hill.

Three of the 72 horses were laid up as a result of what showed up on the scans, while about 20% of the horses examined saw their training schedules modified to manage small underlying issues.

“We had one horse that potentially needed surgery,” said Spriet, of one of the three ostensibly “normal” horses found to have major underlying issues. “We know that there are some horses out there, clinically they are fine, but unfortunately they do break down.”

As Ryan Carpenter, a private SoCal-based veterinarian and a habitual user of PET, puts it, “I don't think there's any modality that's superior to PET when it comes to identifying problems in the sesamoid bones early.”

But what about other vulnerable parts of the racehorse's skeleton?

The same year Santa Anita welcomed the bespoke PET unit, it opened its doors to a standing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit–a large, enclosed cell with dimensions of 10′ x 10′ x 30′.

MRI units, explained Carpenter, are especially adept at identifying issues in the lower ends (the condyles) of the cannon bone, including palmer osteochondral disease (POD), an all-too common degenerative bone problem in racehorses. “There's nothing better for POD than MRI,” he said.

For other notoriously vulnerable regions of the racehorse skeleton–like the shoulder region and the pelvis–Carpenter said that nuclear scintigraphy remains the go-to imaging modality.

There are drawbacks to MRI and PET. One is cost. A new PET unit will set you back some $600,000. Standing MRIs are typically leased from the manufacturer. According to Carpenter, the cost of scanning both front ankles with either PET or MRI is about $1,200.

Another is logistical. It takes between 45 minutes to an hour to scan both fetlocks with MRI.

“The knock on PET is that it requires a horse to go into an isolation period while it eliminates the radioactive isotope,” said Carpenter. The isolation time is about eight hours. “Here, they usually go over to the hospital for a PET at about five o'clock in the morning and they usually go back to the barn around two in the afternoon.”

Which leads to another imaging tool, computerized tomography (CT). Indeed, Racing Victoria requires all international horses that race there, including Melbourne Cup nominees, to undergo CT scans.

“The biggest benefit of the CT is what? It's fast. You can CT an ankle in 17 seconds. And there is no holding period,” said Carpenter.

But CT also has its drawbacks. It has yet to prove itself accurate at pinpointing the more worrying active bone remodeling as early as PET and MRI, said Carpenter. That said, CT offers promise for a diagnostic learning curve, he added.

“I'm hopeful that with CT we can eventually pick up the change in pixels in the location of the bone change before fracturing,” said Carpenter. “If you can make that true, you can scan all four fetlocks, use radiomics to look for changes in pixel density, and do what we're doing now with PET but in a fraction of the time.”

Given his experiences over the past few years, is Carpenter surprised by the results of the PET study that found 4% of 72 clinically sound horses had injuries that required them to be rested for an extended period?

“I'm not surprised at all,” said Carpenter. “We know those horses exist. Our hardest struggle as clinicians is determining which horses they are.”

Given the costs and logistical difficulties associated with PET and MRI, however, “we cannot scan all horses to identify those four percent,” admitted Spriet. “It's just not practical.”

But what if there was another way to objectively sift through the population to identify that small percentage of at-risk horses? Dave Lambert, founder of StrideSAFE, believes he's got the answer.

This scan image is from a fetlock with a severe sesamoid injury. 3D MIP is “maximal intensity projection,” which is a true 3D rendering.

“This is exactly how the system was designed to work”

StrideSAFE is a discreet bio-metric sensor used on horses working or racing to capture a variety of measurements related to the horse's acceleration and deceleration, its up and down concussive movement, and its medial-lateral motion. In other words, the horse's movement from side to side.

In short, StrideSAFE has proven capable of detecting the sorts of subtle abnormalities in gait even the most seasoned trainers, veterinarians and exercise riders miss when watching horses jog up and down a path, or when taking them through their paces.

StrideSAFE originally worked on a traffic light system, with a green for all-clear, a yellow for caution, and a red for possible danger.

In a long-term study conducted on horses racing at New York Racing Association (NYRA) tracks, of the 20 horses that suffered fatal musculoskeletal injuries during the period of the trial, 18 of them had received a red rating in a race before suffering a catastrophic breakdown, said Lambert. One of the 20 had received a prior dark amber rating.

These red and dark amber ratings were issued in either the race immediately prior to the breakdown or else two or three races back, said Lambert, meaning StrideSAFE detected 90% of those horses that suffered a catastrophic injury sometimes weeks or even months in advance.

In total, about 15% of the horses involved in the study were red-flagged, said Lambert. Given how at that time there was still much to learn about StrideSAFE's efficacy, there was no coordinated system to funnel those red-flagged horses for follow-up diagnostics.

Since then, Lambert and his team have refined the system to what he calls a “risk factor calculation” from one to five. Five is the category in which a horse is most at risk of a fatal or career ending injury–nearly 300 times more likely than horses that fall within risk category one. In all, 73% of the horses fell within category one, the safest group.

David Lambert & trainer Dale Romans | StrideSAFE

Using data from the same 6,616 individual starts in the NYRA study, Lambert determined that about 5% of the horses studied–a number totaling 363 horses–fell within the risk category of five. That includes the same 20 horses that suffered catastrophic injuries, 18 of which were red-flagged in prior races.

If the other two fatally injured horses had worn StrideSAFE in high-speed workouts between races, would the sensor have picked up a problem? “We don't know for sure,” said Lambert. “But there's a good chance it would have.”

Interestingly, Lambert said that in general, the red-flagged horses raced back quicker than horses in safer categories. “These horses are sound and they're ready to race,” he said, “but they're sitting on a fracture.”

Earlier this year, StrideSAFE was used on horses racing at Churchill Downs's short Spring meet. All eight horses that suffered a fatal race-day musculoskeletal injury were carrying the technology.

Seven of the eight musculoskeletal cases showed abnormal sensor readings as soon as they left the starting gate, prompting Lambert to subsequently remark that “had the sensors been on the horses in prior races, they could have pointed to an issue the horse was having weeks or even months earlier.”

Unlike the NYRA study, at Churchill Downs there was a more coordinated system for following up with the trainers of flagged horses. StrideSAFE flagged two visibly sound horses that were subsequently sent for PET scans, revealing the beginnings of condylar fractures.

“This is exactly how the system was designed to work,” explained Lambert. “Screen every horse in a race, detect those at high risk, diagnose using modern technology and bring about a cure rather than suffer a fatality.”

But not every horse that's categorized as being at highest risk of injury harbors an underlying issue. And so, to refine the system even further–iron out the kinks–what would be the best application of StrideSAFE?

“If every horse in training wears it,” said Will Farmer, equine medical director for Churchill Downs.

“If every horse had this for every high-speed work and in every race, I think that would be the ultimate goal,” Farmer added. “Anytime that a horse reaches a high speed, and they have a sensor on their back, we would have such a complete picture, there would be multiple opportunities for veterinary intervention.”

A Steve Asmussen-trained worker equipped with StrideSafe | Holly Smith

The results from StrideSAFE present an interesting parallel with a recent study out of Tasmania, which found that horses will decrease their stride length in the weeks leading up to an injury.

Back in 2010, Tasracing partnered with Stridemaster, which had developed a biometric sensor technology, to provide a race-day timing system using GPS and motion sensor data. The original purpose was to provide information to share with the betting public.

“We said, 'hey, that looks like great data. Can we get a hold of it?'” said Chris Whitton, professor of equine medicine and surgery and head of the Equine Centre at the University of Melbourne.

Whitton and his fellow researchers reviewed the data from 584 different horses who made 5660 individual starts. They found a “marked rate of decline” in speed and stride length roughly six races prior to injury.

Going into the study, “I would have thought it was one or two races that they would start showing effects,” said Whitton. “Such a long period I thought was fascinating.”

The researchers also found that horses are especially vulnerable to injury early in their racing career. “The first and second race of a horse's career is actually quite a high risk,” said Whitton.

The Heart of the Problem

Fractured bones don't constitute the only cause of lost equine life on the track.

Though fairly rare, sudden cardiac deaths occur at a rate of one for every 8,789 starts racing, and one death for every 158,000 Thoroughbred training days, according to this CHRB report. But what exactly causes these events largely remains a matter of debate.

This well-considered study looked at post-mortem findings from 268 Thoroughbred racehorses that suffered exercise-related sudden deaths. Pathologists made a definite diagnosis in only 53% of cases, a presumptive diagnosis in 25% cases, while 22% of cases were left unexplained.

Which leads to another biometric sensor technology finding its niche in the sport from a company called Arioneo.

“In total, we are working globally with about 600 trainers and vets,” said Valentin Rapin, Arioneo's managing director. “In the U.S. it's really the beginning for us. We're working with about 40 trainers at the moment.”

Like StrideSAFE, Arionoe's Equimetre fits onto the horse's tack during exercise, sending information back to the user, who can view it on a user-friendly computer dashboard. Part of that data concerns the horse's stride length and stride frequency at all gaits, from walk to trot to gallop and workout.

But Arioneo's Equimetre–which costs about $190 a month per device–also monitors heart-rate, providing data that can be used to assess both performance and overall health, including whether the horse is experiencing physical pain or discomfort, said Rapin.

“We can also look at the level of effort the horse is reaching during exercise. Sometimes you will see some abnormally high level of heart rate during exercise, depending on the speed the horse is going. And you can also see some abnormal recovery data,” said Rapin.

If the heart-rate monitor sends out what amounts to red flags about the horse's heart health, an ECG electrocardiogram (ECG) monitor can be used to map a more sophisticated picture of the horse's heart rate and heart rhythm, to identify any possible underlying problems like arrhythmias.

Rapin highlighted a horse in Australia routinely equipped with the monitor until one day in a workout, its heart rate spiked unusually high. A subsequent ECG analysis of the horse prompted its retirement.

Cristobal Navas De Solis, assistant professor of cardiology/ultrasound and internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, is one of the researchers involved in an ongoing study using Equimetre on three-day-eventers during exercise.

The goal is to find out “which variables are more associated with injury or performance,” said Navas De Solis.

From a recent preliminary analysis of the first two years of data–involving 53 horses and 1,467 individual workouts–the researchers have identified several variables that appear to have some relevance on performance and injury: Heart rate and stride rate during the warm-up period, stride length at certain speeds, symmetry at trot, and heart rate recovery after a workout.

Navas De Solis sees early markers of injury as the “sport's holy grail,” and the standardization of screening tools like Arioneo and StrideSAFE in horse racing as “a big step forward in this direction.” He highlighted an Italian pre-screening program for human athletes that decreased sudden deaths by nearly 90% after implementation.

But he's also a pragmatist. To get to that stage, racing's leaders would need to agree upon a set of well-designed but probably expensive studies involving thousands of horses.

The ultimate program would be one that weeds out the most at-risk horses, and similarly ensures that perfectly healthy horses aren't excluded from competing via false positives.

“Having an arrhythmia during exercise doesn't necessarily mean that the horse or the athlete has a problem. From an arrhythmia standpoint, it's not an all or nothing. Some arrhythmias are okay during exercise and are not going to cause a problem to a horse,” Navas De Solis said.

A key question therefore, said Navas De Solis, is “how do we find the right balance between decreasing injury and not causing unjustified alarm?”

The Research Team at StrideSafe | StrideSafe

“Nothing that can't be solved”

For Farmer's vision of StrideSAFE being used on every horse that works to materialize, a key obstacle is one of logistics.

“Race days are very structured,” said Farmer, of its main use to date at Churchill Downs. “We know times. We know distance. We know horse names. We know everything we need to know days in advance.”

The organized chaos of a busy training morning–with hundreds of horses working, many simultaneously, from dozens of different barns–makes the practicalities of using StrideSAFE infinitely harder in comparison, said Farmer.

“Right now, the logistics of training are very challenging,” said Farmer. “When you collect that data, you then need to identify which horse that refers to. In the sensor design as of today, it's not geared for you to just put it on their back and go. But it's nothing that can't be solved.”

Lambert acknowledged these logistical hurdles but called it “simply a matter of money” to get fixed–at the same time, noting significant contributions already to StrideSAFE from Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale.

“The technology is all there, we even have the idea envisioned, we have planned it out in readiness,” Lambert said, adding that incorporating AI technologies to the mix could help reduce the current costs of $35 a day per horse.

These screening tools also raise other questions to grapple with. For one, who should have access to the data generated? Another is cultural–a sense among those in the industry forged on tradition and custom that these devices could unnecessarily handcuff a trainer.

“Regulations are not going to eliminate risk,” Eric Hamelback, CEO of the National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association (HBPA), at a town hall about StrideSAFE earlier this year. “And quite frankly, we don't want regulations to eliminate horsemanship.”

Proponents of StrideSAFE and Arioneo stress the ability of these technologies to complement the art of training, not to replace it.

“It's a tool that provides objective data, and the goal at the end is to combine the expertise of the trainer–who has all the knowledge and the feeling and the expertise about the horse–with the data to make it successful,” Rapin said.

That idea taps into what Mathieu Spriet means when he talks about “voluntary longitudinal follow up” with imaging devices like PET to make doubly-sure a horse is up to the rigors of training and racing. In other words, the more horses are scanned periodically, “I think the better that is for managing the career of a specific horse,” said Spriet.

“Connections can be like, 'well, this horse is doing well. But we have a big campaign ahead of him, so let's scan and see how it goes,'” Spriet added. “To me, this is the most exciting part of it because we can see things [you ordinarily couldn't] to better manage horses throughout their careers.”

Trainer Dan Blacker is representative of the new generation of conditioner who has embraced the imaging tools in Southern California. He said he's interested in the idea of using StrideSAFE on his horses. “For sure it's got a place,” he added. “If they bring it to California, I'm very willing to support it.”

Dan Blacker | Benoit

Interestingly, The Stronach Group is working on its own screening system which uses high-definition cameras to create detailed skeletal movement maps of horses.

But in the short-term, said Blacker, PET holds the potential to be a major “gamechanger” in the fight to reduce equine fatalities due to its accuracy and simplicity of understanding.

“The thing with the PET scan, it takes away the guess work. That's the one thing I want to get across to people in racing,” Blacker said. “It gives you a clear-cut answer to the question of whether you can keep racing or not. Once trainers nationally get to see that, you're going to see a lot of improvement.”

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In a nearly two-hour town hall Monday morning, StrideSAFE founder David Lambert and Churchill Downs equine medical director Will Farmer dug into the details, discussing the findings from an ongoing study in Kentucky and fielding questions from horsemen.

Eric Hamelback, CEO of the National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association (HBPA), kicked the town hall off by cautioning how fatal equine injuries can happen no matter the regulatory safety net in place.

“Regulations are not going to eliminate risk,” said Hamelback. “And quite frankly, we don't want regulations to eliminate horsemanship.”

Over the next two hours, Lambert made the case that StrideSAFE–which can pick up the sorts of very subtle lameness undetectable to the human eye that are significant enough to possibly cause major musculoskeletal failures at some point down the line–could, if utilized smartly, go a long way to reducing the number of horses injured on the track.

“I firmly believe the only way this problem is going to get solved is if we give the trainers the right kind of information and give it to them in time to give them a chance to do something,” he said, before alluding to the national attention focused on the recent spate of fatalities at Churchill Downs. As a result, the meet was transferred to Ellis Park.

“Right now, you guys are on a beating to nothing,” Lambert added.

As part of a study funded by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission (KHRC) and in tandem with Washington State University, StrideSAFE has been used on all horses that have raced during the Churchill Downs spring 2023 meet, which concludes this Sunday. It has also been used on a select number of horses breezing during the morning.

In all, researchers have collected information from 6,616 individual runs.

The information is organized like a traffic light. A result in the red means there is a potentially major problem and immediate scrutiny of the horse is needed. An amber result suggests a small amount of change in the gait, and cautions connections to be on the lookout. A green result means there is no change and no immediate concern.

According to Lambert, about 5% of the horses studied were given the highest risk red-flag rating. These horses, he added, were about 300 times more likely to suffer a fatal injury than a horse green flagged.

As to how the technology works, StrideSAFE is a wireless iPhone-shaped device that fits snugly into the saddle towel, and eight hundred times a second, it takes an assortment of measurements to capture in minute detail the movement of the horse at high speed.

These measurements include the horse's acceleration and deceleration, the up-and-down concussive movement of the horse, and its medial-lateral motion–what is, in other words, the horse's movement from side to side.

“That's 2,400 data points every second your horse is running or breezing, so this is a massive amount of brand-new information that nobody has ever [received] before,” said Lambert.

Sarah Andrew

To understand exactly how StrideSAFE identifies almost imperceptible signs of lameness, it helps to break a single stride into three distinct stages.

In the first phase of the gallop, the hindlimbs load and propel the horse forward. In the second, the horse shifts its weight toward the front, its forelimbs acting like shock absorbers. This is followed by the lynchpin of the equation: A period of suspension, a mere fraction of a second, when the horse is entirely airborne.

If that horse is suffering a physical ailment or injury, it cannot adjust its body to compensate when its feet are grounded. It can only do this in midair, rotating its spine and pelvis in preparation for a more comfortable landing. Imagine a racecar hurtling along at high speed, one of its bolts working loose.

“The horse does all kinds of things in the air, twisting and shaking and moving,” Lambert had previously explained to the TDN.

In Monday's town hall, Lambert singled out the story of a horse that finished fourth in a Grade I event and showed no visible signs of lameness afterwards. The horse subsequently broke down over a week later during training.

“That sensor is screaming that the horse is in trouble,” said Lambert, highlighting abnormalities in a readout of the horse's high-speed gait during the race.

The town hall proved contentious at times, with some of the attending horsemen–many of whose concerns were voiced by Hamelback–sharing their frustrations that last week's announcement by the StrideSAFE researchers might have given the impression to the layman public that trainers should have known beforehand their horses were at risk.

Lambert apologized about the framing of the press release, all the while stressing how StrideSAFE could be an invaluable tool to catch potential problems early. The trick, explained both Farmer and Lambert, is to pair the StrideSAFE technology with a diagnostic follow-up to pinpoint the site of any brewing issue.

“It's not a diagnostic tool, it's a screening tool,” said Lambert,

Three red-flagged horses were subsequently scanned using the new PET imaging unit at the Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital in Kentucky, according to Denise McSweeney, a co-investigator in the study.

Lambert also admitted that the information collected from StrideSAFE paints far from a complete picture.

Not all the horses given a high-risk red-flag designation will suffer a fatal injury, for example. That's because in part, the horse's stride can be affected by things like the motion of the jockey and by stumbles out of the gate.

Furthermore, “very occasionally, a green-flagged horse will go down,” said Lambert.

But the current inconsistencies in data interpretation are outweighed by the high rate at which the technology identifies potentially at-risk horses, he argued.

“If there's a chance you'll save a jockey from being paralyzed, it's worth doing,” said Lambert, adding how greater use of StrideSAFE would aid in researchers and clinicians getting a better baseline understanding of what the data means.

Attendees also raised data privacy concerns. According to Farmer, the study results are not shared with the KHRC. Rather, the information is sent to Washington State University, where Warwick Bayly is the lead investigator.

In certain cases, the panelists explained, researchers have followed up with the horse's connections directly.

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) is not affiliated with the program.

The ongoing Kentucky study marks just the latest StrideSAFE trial to show promising results.

Of the 20 horses that suffered fatal musculoskeletal injuries during the period of a trial involving the New York Racing Association (NYRA), 17 of them had received a red rating in a race before suffering a catastrophic breakdown. One of the 20 had received a prior dark amber rating.

“Really what my sensor is doing is helping horsemanship,” Lambert said on Monday. In racing's ongoing quest to reduce equine injury and harm, he added, “This could be the answer horsemen are looking for.”

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A grant was awarded to StrideSAFE by the Kentucky Equine Drug Research Council (KEDRC), prompting a research team to hold a two-day meeting at the company's headquarters in Midway, Kentucky. In attendance were lead investigators Dr. Warwick Bayly and Dr. Denise McSweeney; co-investigator and StrideSAFE CEO Dr. David Lambert; and team consultants Dr. Mikael Holmstrom, Dr. Kevin Donohue, Dr. Sue Stover, and Dr. Laura Kennedy; as well as Greg Pachman, who represented StrideSAFE management.

The team reviewed Churchill's recent fatalities, of which eight of the 12 were race-day musculoskeletal events. All eight of the horses were carrying StrideSAFE technology. Seven of the eight musculoskeletal cases showed abnormal sensor readings as soon as they left the starting gate.

“Had the sensors been on the horses in prior races, they could have pointed to an issue the horse was having weeks or even months earlier,” said Lambert. “These results give us great optimism that with consistent use, we should be able to identify issues long before they are discernible to the human eye. StrideSAFE technology will empower trainers and veterinarians with vital information which they can use in their daily efforts to safeguard the welfare of their horses.”

TDN has published a number of stories on StrideSAFE's technology in the past year, including The Missing Link to End Fatal Musculoskeletal Injuries?; Data, Data, Data: The “New Frontier” for Horse Racing; and NYRA, StrideSAFE Sensor Technology Study Begins New Stage.

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StrideSAFE is 'a biometric sensor mechanism that slips into the saddle cloth to detect minute changes in a horses's gait at high speed.' The changes are said to be undetectable to the naked eye and are recorded in a stoplight fashion–green for all clear, varying shades of amber as warnings for possible lameness issues and red for the most potentially serious injuries.

In a study conducted by the New York Racing Association of 6,600 starters in 2022, it was reported that the StrideSAFE technology accurately detected 90% of all the catastrophic injuries. The Rillito study aims to identify horses the Track Regulatory Veterinarians should examine before they run.

The testing of 1,000 Thoroughbreds and American Quarter Horses during the meet is estimated to cost $45,000. Though the technology has only been applies to Thoroughbreds thus far, Quarter Horses will be included at Rillito. Following the research, American Quarter Horse tracks could employ the StrideSAFE sensors across the country.

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Called StrideSAFE, the biometric sensor mechanism slips into the saddle cloth and works like a traffic light signal, providing a green for all-clear, an amber for possible warning (light amber better than dark amber), and a red for possible danger.

The ultimate aim of StrideSAFE–a focus of discussion during the recent Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit–is to detect soundness problems undetectable to the naked eye before they turn potentially catastrophic. Nearly 6,500 races later, the results are in.

Of the 20 horses that suffered fatal musculoskeletal injuries during the period of the trial, 17 of them had received a red rating in a race before suffering a catastrophic breakdown. One of the 20 had received a prior dark amber rating.

Crucially, these red and dark amber ratings were issued in either the race immediately prior to the breakdown or else two or three races back.

Just from the results of this study, therefore, the StrideSAFE technology detected 90% of those horses that suffered a catastrophic injury, sometimes weeks or even months in advance.

“This is obviously a very important group for the trainers to be on top of,” said Dr. David Lambert, founder of StrideSAFE.

Which leads to the next step along the path–a comprehensive program to first identify and then properly manage and diagnose the most at-risk horses.

That's because the 17 horses fatally injured which had received a red rating in prior races were among hundreds of horses red flagged throughout the trial.

While some of these flagged horses are at higher risk of suffering a catastrophic breakdown, others are also more likely to suffer a non-lethal career-ending injury, while some are just slow or ill-disposed to trying, said Lambert. The trick will be to quickly and accurately identify each.

“At this point last year, we were just observing trying to figure out what this all means. Now we know enough to say that a [cautionary] alert means you've got to get the horse looked at,” said Dr. Scott Palmer, equine medical director for the New York State Gaming Commission, about a new trainer email alert system to be unveiled at Saratoga.

“That means we're not just going to look what happens anymore,” Palmer added.

Sarah Andrew

What is StrideSAFE?

This wireless iPhone-shaped device fits snugly into the saddle towel, and eight hundred times a second, it takes an assortment of measurements to capture in minute detail the movement of the horse at high speed.

These measurements include the horse's acceleration and deceleration, the up-and-down concussive movement of the horse, and its medial-lateral motion–what is, in other words, the horse's movement from side to side.

Ultimately, the sensors capture the sorts of high-speed lameness invisible to the naked eye but significant enough to cause major musculoskeletal failures at some point down the line–unless, of course, someone intervenes on the horse's behalf first.

To understand exactly how StrideSAFE identifies almost imperceptible signs of lameness, it helps to break a single stride into three distinct stages.

In the first phase of the gallop, the hindlimbs load and propel the horse forward. In the second, the horse shifts its weight toward the front, its forelimbs acting like shock absorbers. This is followed by the lynchpin of the equation: A period of suspension, a mere fraction of a second, when the horse is entirely airborne.

If that horse is suffering a physical ailment or injury, it cannot adjust its body to compensate when its feet are grounded. It can only do this in midair, rotating its spine and pelvis in preparation for a more comfortable landing.

Imagine a racecar hurtling along at high speed, one of its bolts working loose.

“The horse does all kinds of things in the air, twisting and shaking and moving,” Lambert had previously explained to the TDN.

Which leads to the next important question: How are the red, amber and green ratings calculated?

While some 151 subtle variables are measured within each stride, only 15 are vital to highlight the important differences between individual horses, said Lambert.

Put together, they create a basic standard running from 0 (which is the safest green rating) to greater than eight (which is at the red-hot end of the spectrum) against which all horses can be compared.

At the highest end of that spectrum–a standard deviation greater than eight–the findings were remarkable. Horses awarded this rating in a prior race were more than 50% likely to suffer a fatal injury in a subsequent race or breeze.

More broadly, of the 6,458 individual runs in the NYRA study, 74.5% were rated green, 6.6% were rated light amber, 5.5% were rated dark amber and 13.4% were rated red.

This means that 865 horses were red flagged–a relatively small percentage of the overall runners.

But given how these horses aren't visibly lame–and as such, are tough to diagnose if harboring an underlying physical issue–that's still a lot of horses to sift through in order to identify the few most likely to breakdown.

Sarah Andrew

Lambert developed this technology with Mikael Holmstroem, a Swedish Ph.D. with expertise in equine conformation and locomotion, and Kevin Donohue, Ph.D., professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Kentucky.

And so, Lambert and this team tweaked the algorithm to identify the most at-risk horses and shave off the horses in less immediate danger. In doing so, they zeroed in on 7.4% of the population.

“You find the pattern and then you direct the modeling,” explained Lambert. “And when we did that, we found that 40% improvement and got us down to around 7% without missing any of the [fatally injured horses].”

That's not to say the other red-flagged horses should be ignored, for the study proves how physical deterioration leading up to a catastrophic musculoskeletal injury is typically a long degenerative process over weeks and even months.

This tallies up with the scientific literature on fatal breakdowns which shows just how frequently pre-existing lesions appear at the actual site of the injury.

“This is not a case of them being sound one moment and broken the next. This process is a continuum,” said Lambert. “It's not reliable as a soundness screen,” he added, “it's intended as a breakdown screen.”

Of all the horses that received a green rating during the NYRA study, 77% were racing again in less than 60 days, and 85% were racing again in less than 120 days.

That same study hasn't yet been done for red-flagged horses, says Lambert. But an analysis at the start of the program found that only about 40% of the horses that had a red classification were able to race at all over the next four months after the analyzed race.

This means that once a horse has received a cautionary flag, there needs to be a process in place to funnel it toward the right tool to diagnose the brewing issue.

“The analogy is the check engine light in your car,” said Palmer, agreeing with Lambert. “When that check engine light goes on, what does it mean? It means you've got to get someone to check your car.”

Sarah Andrew

According to Palmer, he and the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association (NYTHA) have recently launched a new system at Saratoga whereby the trainer of a horse given a cautionary flag in a race subsequently receives an email alert, or what is coined an “advisory letter.”

“A [cautionary] alert is not a 'Scarlet Letter'–it does not mean [the horse is] going to die or it's going to get a fracture,” said Palmer, about what such an email means. “The gist of it is, you need to get the horse examined by a veterinarian. That's the bottom line.”

Because StrideSAFE can detect lameness not visible to the naked eye, some of the brewing problems will only be detected using some of the more sensitive diagnostic technologies that are making their way onto the marketplace–but not always.

“Some of them [veterinarians and trainers] are going to be able to find something using flexion tests and usual diagnostic exams, hoof testers,” said Palmer. “These are not the sorts of things that are ordinarily done to a horse every day.”

Nevertheless, Palmer stresses that in the majority of cases, the added veterinary scrutiny will result in a diagnostic thumbs-up, calling it a “not one-size-fits-all” scenario.

“If it's a minor problem, the horse can get some time off, come back and everything's fine,” he said. “In some cases, I fully expect that we'll find nothing, and the horse will be able to go right back and race again.”

Given the work that lies ahead, NYTHA President Joe Appelbaum turned to a baseball analogy, describing the program at first or second innings.

“This is great,” said Appelbaum. “But we need as wide-ranging data set as we can find. We need to share that data and research it hard. We're at the beginning of this game, not the end.”

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“As we know from our 20 years or so of research in this area,

85% of the horses that break down have preexisting musculoskeletal disease or damage, and if we can identify that damage early, we can intervene and take care of it,” Palmer said. “You've probably heard a lot about PET scans and CAT scans and advanced imaging. These are great diagnostic tools, but they're not great screening tools because first of all, they're not readily available. Second of all, they're not inexpensive. Third of all is that they are not necessarily accurate as to what we're measuring. So they're terrific, but we need a screening device to identify horses that need to go get that imaging, because we can't do a PET scan on every Thoroughbred racehorse. It's just not practical.

“[StrideSafe] is like a check engine light in your car. When you're driving down the road and the check engine light comes on, that doesn't mean you have to stop the car immediately, but it means you're going to get this thing looked at because something's going on here. If you don't do that, something bad is going to happen. So that's what we've got here is a check engine light, and with that kind of information, that's going to help us to identify these horses at risk of injury, because we can see lameness before a human being can see it or before the jockey can feel it.”

The StrideSafe device is about as big as a cell phone and is put in the saddle cloth of racehorses at New York tracks when they run. It detects any deviation in each facet of a horse's stride and labels that horse in the colors of a traffic light–green, yellow and red. From their pilot study last year, Palmer and his team found that horses labeled red were much less likely to run back in the same amount of time as green or yellow horses.

“If a horse is a red-flag horse, it means this horse has got something significantly abnormal about his gait. And that is meaningful,” Palmer said. “That's a danger sign if we see these red signals. A horse can have a different degree of variation from normal, and we're not too worried about the yellow horses. The yellow means okay, caution light, slow down. Take a look. The red light means you really have to get this horse looked at because something's going on here. And maybe it's not obvious to the human eye right away. The horses that were red [in our study], only 40% of those horses made it back to train or race within four months. Almost 80% of the greens and yellows did. So in other words, what this means is that I can accurately tell a trainer, if you get a red alert, you've got a 40% chance of making it back to race in four months. That's a really bad business model, if nothing else, and it also means that your horse is likely at risk of injury. So we're going to record every horse in every race at Saratoga, and we've been working with Joe Appelbaum and NYTHA, where for all the red reports, I will notify Joe and he's going to send an email to the trainer of that horse, saying this is what it means, this is what it doesn't mean, this is what you need to do.”

Elsewhere on the show, which is also sponsored by Coolmore, the Pennsylvania Horse Breeders Association, XBTV, West Point Thoroughbreds and Legacy Bloodstock, the writers previewed the highly-anticipated Saratoga meet, discussed the suspension of Juan Vazquez and celebrated the penny breakage era starting in Kentucky. Click here to watch the show; click here for the audio-only version or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Into the final furlong, The Ridler drifted markedly left across the field, hampering the chances of several other runners. Controversially for some, The Ridler kept the race after a steward's inquiry.

During a presentation at Wednesday's Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit, Will Duff Gordon, CEO of Total Performance Data, which provides in-running horseracing data, provided another intriguing way to examine the race.

Duff Gordon presented a chart showing the acceleration and speed of a horse during the race, and how it was impeded by the winner.

“You can see how that horse in blue, how much its velocity was cut off,” said Duff Gordon, pointing to the marked deceleration of a beaten runner at the time of The Ridler's antics.

“That's a much better way of telling the story rather than running the replay 700 times, which is what the TV companies have done to date,” said Duff Gordon. “The stewards can't yet use that information,” he added, “but hopefully they will soon.”

TPD's chart shows the deceleration of the impeded horses in the Norfolk

Duff Gordon was part of a panel looking at some of the data collection technologies forging a new path in equine welfare and performance during racing and training, and racecourse customer experience.

“This is a new frontier,” said Scott Palmer, equine medical director for the New York Gaming Commission, about the StrideSAFE sensor, which TDN has written about here.

Nevertheless, the panelists emphasized how, in many regards, the stamp from data collection on the racing world is still very much a fresh one.

Greater accuracy comes from sheer depth in numbers, and pick-up of these technologies among industry stakeholders at large has been finicky at best.

Correct interpretation of the data is also key. Racing is hardly awash with number crunchers, data analysts and epidemiologists. That's why, said Palmer, “this is baby steps right now.”

Duff Gordon agreed.

“We create in-running odds. That's making 10,000 calculations per-horse, per-second to predict who's going to win the race. We can refine that all the time,” he said.

“The last few years has been about acquiring the data, getting onto as many racecourses as possible. The present and the future's all about producing front ends and mining that data, so we're hiring huge numbers of data scientists,” Duff Gordon added. “Any budding data scientists, please do get in touch with me. We can never get enough of them.”

Presided over by New York Thoroughbred Horseman's Association president, Joe Appelbaum, the panel also included Valentin Rapin, managing director and co-founder of Arioneo, a horse performance company.

The technologies that Arioneo produces are geared around morning training, including heart-rate monitoring, locomotion and stride data, and GPS tracking of speed, distance and acceleration.

Broadly speaking, these discreet, easy-to-use technologies can be utilized to gauge things like the overall fitness level of the horse, it's optimum speed, suitable distances and ground preferences.

There's a welfare element, too, explained Rapin, as the heart-rate monitor gives trainers the ability to check for cardiac abnormalities.

“Let's say the horse is about 125 beats a minute every day. If one day you see the heart rate go up to 140, 150, it will probably mean there is something wrong,” said Rapin.

“You can contact your vet directly or your vet can also have access to the data via distance to monitor this for you,” Rapin added.

“It's really in the strike-rate,” interjected Duff Gordon.

“The trainers who have that huge, extra level of insight, their horses are ready to rumble and you have trainers with less horses punching above their weight,” Duff Gordon said, pointing towards the likes of George Boughey, a young UK-based trainer with an English Classic win to his name into just his fourth year with a license.

“He's got less than 50 horses, and [has] no right to be winning [like he is],” said Duff Gordon, adding how the likes of Boughey have harnessed the use of performance monitoring technologies with shrewd purchases at the sales.

StrideSAFE is a technology that fits into a horse's saddle towel with the ability to detect at high speeds lameness invisible to the naked eye. Since last summer, it has been used on thousands of starters across Saratoga, Belmont and Aqueduct.

“What were able to do with this device is actually detect lameness in early stages to provide for timely intervention,” said Palmer.

“We can work with the trainer and say, 'Your horse is not lame today, but the warning signs are clear. You need to get this horse evaluated by a veterinarian. It needs a good diagnostic workout because something's going on here,'” Palmer added.

Hundreds of times a second, this wireless iPhone-shaped device takes an assortment of measurements to capture in minute detail the movement of the horse at high speed.

These measurements include the horse's acceleration and deceleration, the up and down concussive movement of the horse, and its medial-lateral motion–what is, in other words, the horse's movement from side to side.

It works like a traffic light signal, providing a green for all-clear, an amber for possible caution, and a red for possible danger. These ratings are calculated by how many standard deviations the horse is from the norm.

“If they exceed three standard deviations from the mean we have what we call red alert, and that means there's something happening in this race that needs to be investigated,” said Palmer. “There's a change here.”

Palmer told the story of early on into the trial of a horse that finished second in a maiden special weight at Saratoga.

Immediately after the race, the horse appeared healthy and sound. But when Palmer received the StrideSAFE read-out of the race the following day, it showed worrying abnormalities in the horse's balance.

“When I got this data, I didn't know exactly what it meant,” said Palmer, who said that he called the trainer, asked about the horse.

“The trainer said, 'Well, this horse finished the race great.' Jockey had hopped off. Trainer was there in the unsaddling area. Everybody was happy, finished second in a maiden special weight for 2-year-olds at Saratoga,” said Palmer.

By the time the horse had walked back to the test barn and began to cool-out, it became lame–so much so, the horse had to be shipped back to the barn. A subsequent radiograph showed the horse had suffered an acute fracture of the third carpal bone.

“It was a very dramatic example for me that we were measuring something important,” said Palmer.

While researchers are still analyzing the data from the longer study, Palmer shared some numbers showing attrition rates among a small cohort of horses studied at Saratoga: 15 that had received red alerts, 25 with a yellow alert, and 91 with green alerts.

Broadly speaking, the horses with a red alert generally did not make it back to race for a “significant amount of time” as compared to the yellow and green horses, said Palmer.

The red horses didn't compete in as many races as the yellow and green alerted horses during a four-month follow-up period, nor complete as many high-speed workouts, added Palmer.

“Interestingly, only 40% of the horses that had a red classification were able to race at all over the next four months after the analyzed race compared to almost 80% of the greens and the yellows,” said Palmer. “I thought that was powerfully significant.”

In his “zealot's pitch” at the end of the panel discussion, Appelbaum implored the industry to accelerate its adoption of these kinds of technologies.

“There's not a human football player or soccer player at the professional level that's not using a catapult vest. In F1, the drivers all use gloves that track their heart rate and perspiration. Weightlifters are all using push-bands to understand their load,” said Appelbaum.

“Humans sports are about 10 years ahead of us,” Appelbaum added. “But we can catch up and we should catch up. It's not just for the benefit of the betting public, but it's really for the benefit of the horses.”

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