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Thread: Changing leads
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Old 03-28-2017, 03:47 PM   #31
VigorsTheGrey
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Join Date: Feb 2016
Posts: 4,553
Quote:
Originally Posted by HandiTrack View Post
Hi everyone! Sorry to jump in as a stranger (unless you happen to know me as Flute from thoroughbredchampions lol but I hardly post there anymore), but I thought I might add a little more to the technical explanation of this, in case anyone was really THAT curious.

When a horse gallops, they are starting their stride by pushing off with one hind foot, then they move to the other hind foot, and the diagonally opposite front foot, followed lastly by the other front foot (that would be the "lead" that people tend to look at). I would Google "horse gallop foot falls" if you really want to see this visually, there are good diagrams out there that show the "Z" shape. After they move off that final front foot, there is a period of time in the stride where they are completely off the ground (this is also called the "gathering" stage of the stride). This little horse below is demonstrating that part of the stride quite nicely.

This gathering part of the stride is where the horse changes his lead, and he simply switches to pushing off with the other hind foot at that point and then reverses the foot falls. This is something they do naturally in the wild, every horse knows how to do it even though some are more adept at it than others. It happens right in stride, there is no stutterstep or other kind of hesitation that would change the forward momentum of the horse unless they are doing something REALLY weird, and I wouldn't imagine they would finish out the race well in that case.

Ok, back to lurking and fiddling with my little handicapping program (I'm a web/python dev), nice to meet you all.
Welcome aboard to PaceAdvantage website...hoping you post often...thank you for elucidating the "lead change" phenomenon....so is it the case that the lead change is controlled by the hind legs switching while "airing"...? Could the lead change be effected also by the front legs switching while airing as well...? What you say does makes some sense but since the air time is just under human observation limits, we can only see the after- effects of the switch...we see THAT a horse HAS changed leads, but we are unable to observe the actual switch while the horse is " airing"...

Last edited by VigorsTheGrey; 03-28-2017 at 03:50 PM.
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