[QUOTE=hessy35;4024656]
They are only fragile becuase they are being raced at 2 when they are 17 hand plus horses that have a TON Of growing to do before their growth plates shut completely. Any horse that size should be started slowly in my opinon. He is a wonderful Stallion, but when you take his huge babies and make them train at a young age you are going to get horse that breaks down A LOT!!! That is just the reality of training a HUGE horse.[/QUOTE]
This is in direct contradiction to the findings of Dr. Larry Bramlage, “one of the best known and widely respected equine surgeons in the world” and chairman of the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation’s Veterinary Advisory Committee.
Charge number one: The training and racing of 2-year-old Thoroughbreds is predisposing these horses to accelerated rates of injury and prematurely shortened careers.
This charge is leveled by some people in and out of the horse industry, especially people outside of racing. It is a very popular theme with animal welfare organizations that are ill informed on the topic of racing and the horse; it is also parroted frequently in the popular press.
To examine these data The Jockey Club Information Systems extracted one-year windows at five-year intervals, using the years 1975 through 2000 as data sets. Horses were divided into the categories “raced as two-year-olds” and “raced, but not as two-year-olds.” The data shows a definitive answer to this charge.
The first category of data examined was average starts per starter lifetime. The data shows that horses that raced as 2-year-olds raced many more times in their lifetime in each of the years examined when compared to horses that did not race until after their 2-year-old season. Some of these starts were made in the 2-year-old year for the horses that raced at 2, but the difference was more marked than the 2-year-old year alone would account for.
Average lifetime earnings per starter for horses that raced as 2-year-olds are almost twice the amount earned by horses that did not race as 2-year-olds.
Career average earnings per start for horses that raced as 2-year-olds exceeded average earnings per start for horses that did not race as 2-year-olds in every one of the years from 1975 to 2000 examined.
Lastly, the percent stakes winners in horses that raced as 2-year-olds is nearly three times higher than in horses that did not race until their 3-year-old year or later.
This data is definitive. It shows that horses that began racing as 2-year-olds are much more successful, have much longer careers, and, by extrapolation, show less predisposition to injury than horses that did not begin racing until their 3-year-old year. It is absolute on all the data sets that the training and racing of 2-year-old Thoroughbreds has no ill effect on the horses’ race-career longevity or quality. In fact, the data would indicate that the ability to make at least one start as a 2-year-old has a very strong positive affect on the longevity and success of a racehorse. This strong positive effect on the quality and quantity of performance would make it impossible to argue that these horses that race as 2-year-olds are compromised.
These data strongly support the physiologic premise that it is easier for a horse to adapt to training when training begins at the end of skeletal growth. Initiation of training at the end of growth takes advantage of the established blood supply and cell populations that are then converted from growth to the adaptation to training. It is much more difficult for a horse to adapt to training after the musculoskeletal system is allowed to atrophy at the end of growth because the bone formation support system that is still present in the adolescent horse must be re-created in the skeletally mature horse that initiates training.
from http://www.jockeyclub.com/roundtable_08.asp?section=11
See also
http://www.thehorse.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=10983
http://www.grayson-jockeyclub.org/resources/June%201997%20newsletter.pdf
