Using Technology to Reduce Breakdowns

[Jeff P]

Thoroughbred Daily News | By Dan Ross | Updated: April 18, 2022 at 2:16 pm
The Missing Link to End Fatal Musculoskeletal Injuries?
https://www.thoroughbreddailynews.co...etal-injuries/

By the beginning of April, there had been two fatal musculoskeletal injuries during the current Santa Anita meet. Wind the clock back to an identical window in 2019, there had been 22.

During Aqueduct's benighted 2011-2012 Winter meet, 21 horses died, 18 of which were fractures sustained during racing. Over the next seven years, New York's four racetracks saw a 50% reduction in racing fatalities.

What is the common denominator? Huge advances in identifying those horses at higher risk of sustaining fatal injuries in racing and training, and much tighter safety nets to filter these horses out of the racing pipeline before a catastrophic event occurs.

Racing's North Star is to reduce the number of musculoskeletal injuries to a single duck egg. But there remains a stubborn impediment: The ability to easily and accurately identify those emerging and subtle injuries that can't be detected with the naked eye but have the potential to devolve into a sickening fracture.

How prevalent are these sorts of issues? Well, 21 one of the 22 horses that died during Santa Anita's 2018-2019 Winter meet showed pre-existing pathology at the site of their fatal injuries.

Enter stage left the 21st century, and a collision of new technologies that bring an objective, mathematical approach to pin-pointing these hitherto elusive and barely perceptible problems.

The New York Racing Association (NYRA) is deep into a project that began last summer to trial a sophisticated biometric sensor mechanism which fits snugly into the horse's saddle cloth and can detect minute changes in a horse's gait at high speed. Called StrideSAFE, the sensor has been proven to detect problems in a horse's stride sometimes weeks in advance of a catastrophic event occurring.

Over on the opposite side of the country, The Stronach Group, under its 1/ST banner, is gearing up to unveil its own system which uses high-definition cameras to create detailed skeletal movement maps of horses as they navigate the racetrack. Company officials believe the technology has the potential to similarly red-flag horses at the very earliest warning stages.

What's more, these new kids on the block converge with an emerging generation of imaging modalities-think PET, MRI and CT-more capable than their diagnostic ancestors of providing a clear yes or no answer to the presence of subtle pre-existing problems.

And now, some of the industry's most pragmatic, unflappable leaders are making the argument that, given further development and understanding, these biometric systems hold the key to reducing fatal musculoskeletal injuries from the sport even further-potentially altogether.

“This is probably one of the most important contributions to the Thoroughbred horse industry that has ever been made,” said Scott Palmer, equine medical director for the New York State Gaming Commission, about the StrideSAFE sensor.

-jp

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[Mulerider]

Interesting, Jeff.

In sanitized horse racing lingo, a pre-existing microfracture that leads to a breakdown is usually called "taking a bad step."

[RonTiller]

Jeff,

As somebody who has been thinking about this whole issue for a long time, maybe you can discuss some of the possible implications of this new technology (beyond the obvious that horse lives may be saved!).

Maybe these questions display a naive misunderstanding of these technologies but I've never been afraid of being a bonehead in public, so here goes.

Might there be state by state restrictions on horses running within a certain window of having scored red on the StrideSAFE?

If all tracks and states don't adopt this new technology (as must surely happen) might we have a situation like we have with Lasix, where certain horses and/or trainers don't run in certain states?

What percentage of horses might have these dangerous micro-fractures (I know this may be just a WAG)?

What if a horse wearing a StrideSAFE unit goes red during the running of a race? Might the jockey be required to pull up? What of the bettors who had bets on that horse?

Will the StrideSAFE information be made public if tracks start adopting it? Should it? Or might it just be a tool that some trainers privately use?

Why in the world can we have amazing, mind-blowing technology like this and accurate race timing (something taken for granted in other sports) is still a struggle?

Kudos to everyone involved in developing all this technology and kudos to Dave Lambert for all that he does. Its good to know that there is a robust industry developing technologies like these which is largely unknown to most handicappers.

Ron Tiller
HDW