Michelle (horse stuff - breed in decline?)
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They ain't what they used to be
A declining gene pool ensures today's racehorses
are no match for legends like Secretariat
NEIL A. CAMPBELL
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, June 5, 1999
Charismatic will earn $5.6-million (U.S.) for his owners if he wins the
Triple Crown today with a victory in the Belmont Stakes in New York.
That's enough to buy a million bales of hay and 15 million kilograms of
oats.
But it won't get Charismatic accepted as a thoroughbred legend the way
most of the 11 previous Triple Crown winners were embraced.
"Normally I'm really rooting for a horse to win the Triple Crown," said
David Willmot, president of the Ontario Jockey Club and one of
Canada's leading thoroughbred breeders. "But I'm not with this horse."
Charismatic is a powerful chestnut with splashes of white on his face and
around the bottom of his four legs. He looks like Secretariat, the Triple
Crown winner of 1973. But he doesn't run like Secretariat.
Indeed, many see Charismatic as symbolic of a breed that is in decline
because of excessive inbreeding, an undue emphasis on medication and
veterinary science, and a fixation on speed above all else.
The average horse in North America made more than 10 starts in a
season 25 years ago. Now they reach the starting gate barely seven
times. Those at the top of the thoroughbred pyramid today are slower,
less consistent and more fragile. That is not good news for a sport
desperately in need of the fresh fans that a genuine star might bring.
"There clearly appears to me to be a deficiency," said Ric Waldman,
breeding consultant for Overbrook Farm, one of the United States' most
successful racing-breeding operations.
"Horses with poor throat conformations, horses with crooked legs,
those horses might not have gotten to the races in years gone by. But
now through surgical means we can fix those problems and straighten
those legs."
Some of these horses become stallions or broodmares, passing their
frailties into a gene pool already weakened by too much exposure to a
select group of stallions.
"The racehorses we're talking about, the Secretariats and Seattle Slews,
they had endurance and speed," said Reade Baker, a breeding adviser
and one of the leading trainers at Woodbine Race Track in Toronto.
"They had brilliant speed and the soundness to train like hell. We seem to
have bred that out of our horses. The ones today just have speed. They
don't have the soundness and they don't have the constitution."
Horses of today are still capable of the odd outstanding performance.
Some track records still fall. But over all, times have slowed slightly. And
no horse of today comes close to the sustained brilliance of a Secretariat
or a Seattle Slew, which won the Triple Crown in 1977.
Secretariat roared to stardom in 1972 as a two-year-old. Enthusiasts
anticipated his first three-year-old race, especially after his breeding
rights were sold for a then-record $6-million.
And he didn't disappoint them. He set track records in the Kentucky
Derby and Belmont Stakes that still stand today and would have set a
record in the Preakness had the track's timing equipment not
malfunctioned. He was on the cover of Time and Newsweek.
Charismatic, by comparison, finished first only once during his first 13
starts. Twice he was in a claiming race for $62,500, meaning anyone
could have bought him for that price as recently as February.
Charismatic's Derby-winning time was about four seconds slower than
Secretariat's.
Other horses blazed to stardom during the 1970s as two-year-olds,
then kept winning the best races at three and beyond. In addition to
Seattle Slew, Affirmed won the Triple Crown a year later in 1978 and
Spectacular Bid just missed in 1979. No horse has worn the crown
since.
Nowadays, hyped young horses typically fail to sustain their brilliance
for more than half a season or so. They have become shooting stars.
Real Quiet, who lost the Triple Crown last year by only a nose, had also
come out of nowhere. He had won just two of a dozen starts before
victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness. And he has won just
one race since.
"It's a concern," successful Ontario horse breeder Bob Anderson said.
"It [that the quality of the breed has declined] is a theory that's fairly
widely held."
Networks know that true stars sell tickets and bring viewers. So they
desperately try to create them.
Take Silver Charm, for example. He is owned by Bob and Beverly
Lewis of California, the same couple who own Charismatic. Silver
Charm won the Derby and Preakness two years ago and was widely
hyped by ABC as the next superhorse. But he lost the Belmont. Last
year, after a successful four-year-old season, his championship
showdown in the Breeders' Cup Classic with five-year-old Skip Away
was hailed as the race of the decade by NBC. Neither horse won.
Earlier this year, Fox launched a series of races for older horses called
Champions on Fox. Silver Charm was the cornerstone of the
series-opening Donn Handicap, held in Miami a day before the Super
Bowl, and the network got football announcer Terry Bradshaw to hold
up a copy of the Daily Racing Form and brag about Silver Charm's
greatness. Once again, hype outstripped performance. Silver Charm was
never in contention.
Real superstars can never be perfect. But in other sports the best
performers usually come through when all eyes are on them. That hasn't
happened much lately in horse racing.
"If you took the top 30 horses of today, they would not rank with the
top 30 horses of 25 years ago," Willmot said. "My theory as a breeder
is that nowadays we're breeding a more fragile horse. We are not
breeding as sound an animal and we are not raising a horse who is as
much of an athlete."
All thoroughbreds descend from one of three Arabian stallions that were
sent to England hundreds of years ago. So inbreeding is not new.
But it's become more of an issue recently. The breed in North America
was refreshed 40 and 50 years ago by the importation of some of the
best stallions in Europe. Yes, they shared the same distant ancestors as
North American horses. But the connection was far removed, and the
new studs mated well with domestic mares. Most of the great horses of
the golden era from the 1950s through the 1970s were direct
descendants of these European sires.
Then the genetic base began to narrow. Several stallions, including
Northern Dancer, the first Canadian winner of the Kentucky Derby,
began to dominate the breed. These new stallions produced successful
racehorses that were faster than previous generations, though not quite
as sturdy. Demand soared for their sons and daughters. Fast horses that
weren't entirely durable were bred to fast horses that weren't entirely
durable. The cycle had begun.
"The element of speed is essential to breeders [who hope to sell yearling
thoroughbreds] and we don't have a lot of sources of speed," Anderson
said. "So we've inbred so much that the result could be a fragile breed."
Phil McCarthy is an Ottawa native who is now among the most
respected veterinarians in Kentucky. One of his clients has farms in both
Kentucky and Australia, and he thinks some of the better-bred North
American horses, those most likely to develop into champions, might be
pampered too much. He points out that infant thoroughbreds in Australia
are allowed to roam natural terrain with the herd whereas Kentucky
paddocks are manicured to perfection and horses are kept in small
groups. The Australian horses, he says, develop a much tougher foot.
An obvious answer to the problem is to introduce greater stamina and
durability into the breed by importing stallions from other regions. But
that's easier said than done. European racing and breeding is dominated
nowadays by the same stallion lines as North America. And any breeder
sending mares to slower more sturdy stallions would court commercial
disaster. The buyers still want speed.
"I don't know what on earth one would do about it," Willmot said.
Charismatic is a 2-to-1 favourite in the Belmont Stakes today in New
York but even if he wins the cynics will not go away. |
