Male Horses More Likely for Breakdowns?

And lot’s of interesting information to chew on. Here’s the pdf of the Equibase figures if anyone wants to read it. (The link to this is via the Paulick Report).

NA TB CED

The raw numbers in this are pretty interesting, especially with regards to horses that make their first start as 2yo as they suffer less than their share of breakdowns.

Here’s the Jockey Club numbers (report)

If you look at the raw numbers in the report I linked to above and the conclusions in the Jockey Club report you get two different outlooks.

The first report (in raw numbers) claims that horses that race on dirt are twice as likely to suffer a career ending injury than ones that race on turf or synthetic. The second report states that the differences aren’t statistically significant.

I’d like to see the raw numbers in the Jockey Club report.

It’d be pretty interesting to see those figures.

I didn’t mean for this to go on the front page – thanks? Hehe

If you calculate the rate per 1,000 breakdowns from the TOBA / Equibase report you get a different picture to the Jockey Club report. This may be due to how each report is classifying a “breakdown” or size of data used, or something else, I really don’t know. Just looking at the surface comparisons we get the following:

TOBA/Equibase:

Dirt – 3.90
Turf – 2.61
AW – 1.85

Jockey Club:

Dirt – 2.14
Turf – 1.78
AW – 1.78

Those are very different injury rates and would lead to very different conclusions. I have no idea which should be considered more accurate or if either of them are very accurate, but it will certainly spark debate in the industry.