Super Bowl in July? Watch a New Budweiser Clydesdale Commercial for FIFA World Cup Round of 16

This article has nothing to do with hooves, except for the fact that the Budweiser Clydesdales have big, heavy, famous ones.

By tonight, everyone will have seen this commercial, but here's a preview of what will surely make a delightful culture clash during ESPN's broadcast later today of the USA-Belgium match as the next level of FIFA World Cup competition begins for Team USA in Brazil.

Equine Sport Science, ESPN-Style, Looks at Zenyatta

During today's Breeders Cup broadcast, ESPN took a stab at trying to explain Zenyatta's superior performance ability. They put together great graphics and computer images but understandably had to take some shortcuts to "dumb it down" for the casual national television audience.

I can just see Professor Hilary Clayton, the leading biomechanics expert in North America, pursing her lips and shaking her head, "Well, noooo, not exactly..." and Professor Jean-Marie Denoix over in France,  rolling his eyes, throwing up his hands and sighing, "Oh, mon dieu! The Americans just don't understand..."

How do you squash a PhD into three minutes? Well, you don't. But at least they tried.

Of course ESPN can't go into detail--John Brenkus only had three minutes to explain the whole thing! Anyone who knows about horses will know that it's not just about stride length and height at the withers--if it was, the big horses would dominate, and we'd have no way to explain Goldikova, Smarty Jones, Northern Dancer, Mine That Bird (he did win the Derby!) and all the smaller, more compact Thoroughbreds who are, after all, the more common horses running in our races. And the more commonly found horses in the winner's circle are not over 17 hands.

The same is true of jumpers; it might seem like bigger horses would be better jumpers but it's not a given. There are many factors to consider.

The great 18th century racehorse champion Eclipse is believed to have excelled because he was extraordinarily "normal". His body parts were in harmonious proportion to each other, which scientists believe facilitated speed.

Studies have been done that show that the most successful racehorses are not the largest or the smallest or the most anything but the most "average"--the ones whose proportions are average. Take Eclipse, for instance. That most successful of original racehorses left us his skeleton, which has been analyzed by Professor Alan Wilson and his researchers at the Structure and Motion Analysis Lab at the Royal Veterinary College in England.

Based on Eclipse and other racehorses, Wilson's data analysis determined that it was not size that mattered in  champion racehorses but proportion. The champion racehorses like Eclipse had all their body parts in proportion to each other--no one body part was out of a statistical range in proportion to others. Their skeletal systems demonstrated a balance of dimensions.

(By the way, the great Eclipse went down in history in the 1700s for winning 18 races--one less than Zenyatta. It is said his jockey never used a whip or spurs.)

The formula for speed is not just the distance covered in a stride, but the stride length x the stride frequency. There is also the x factor of efficiency--how straight are the limbs, how much excess motion is there, how efficient is the respiration, etc.?  How easy is it for the horse to reach his hind limbs underneath his body, and how far under his body do they reach? There are many ingredients to a racehorse's stride and speed formula.

So a horse with a shorter stride but a fleeter, more efficient turn of foot can potentially run faster than a long-striding large horse, although one wonders if the smaller horse may tire sooner if taking more breaths and more strides. But they may be more efficient strides.

This is where shoes come in. A horse that can't "get hold" of the track loses stride efficiency and, often, even stride frequency if the foot is delayed in breakover or the horse struggles to re-orient the foot to land in a certain pattern to avoid pain or limb interference or simple fatigue from sinking too deep into sandy footing.

It's probably harder and more time-consuming to train a huge huge with a huge stride like Zenyatta's, and the racing public should remember and respect that John Sherriffs opted to delay her start in the races until she was ready, probably because of her need to finish developing physically and no doubt "find her balance" when running at speed. Most big horses would not be given that luxury to develop first, race when ready.


Those are just some of the factors that enter into the equation of why Zenyatta excels. You can do formulas and analyze her all day but there are some intangibles. One them is called "heart". Not the heart in the chest, but the heart in the spirit. Zenyatta is loaded with that.

We saw that heart today.

A great racehorse will always be just out of the reach of science. If not, there'd be no reason to go to the races. Handicapping would be an exact science. But thankfully we still have that x factor.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.
 

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Familiar Feet in the Derby Week Crowd?

by Fran Jurga | 30 April 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

The Onion website is reporting that 2008 Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown has come out of retirement and will look great in a pinstripe sheet as an ESPN commentator for Saturday's pre-race coverage. The same publication announced a year ago that the same Mr. Brown signed a $90 million athletic shoe endorsement with Nike. Humor is The Onion's business and they do it (and Photoshop) very well. I think they miss Big Brown almost as much as I do.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Double click on cover image for a larger view of the artwork.

Black Bag Vet: ESPN Writer Follows the Races, Pens the Tragic Final Furlong As Seen Through Vet's Eyes

by Fran Jurga | 29 April 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

We're well into Derby Week now and I think the 135th Kentucky Derby will go down in history as the one with the most words written about it. And they're the same words written over and over, just to appear in different places: in newspapers, in magazines, on blogs, on web sites, on Facebook and this year we're also writing them on Twitter, the 2009 phenomenon of internet communication that squashes your message to the world into a 140-character one-liner.

Everyone is racing to be the first to tell you who has scratched (or, in my case, who has cracked) or which jockey has switched horses but no one that I have read seems to be putting much effort into great writing.

No one except someone I found tonight.

I hope Seth Wickersham wins an Eclipse Award for his article in this week's ESPN Magazine. In The Final Furlong, he rides along with veterinarian Lauren Canady as she trails the field in the first race at The Fair Grounds in New Orleans. He witnesses a catastrophic breakdown immediately.

Wickersham's attention to detail is admirable, as is his historical research into the transition from death by gunshot to death by pink syringe...and why many veterinarians wish that a gunshot was still the way to go.

Veterinarians have been getting a bad rap lately. Most of the vets I know work very hard and do care about horses, and they care very much. The job of the track regulatory vet on a week day at the racetrack is so far from the romantic dream of a high school girl who wants to go to vet school to save all the beautiful horses that it makes a perfect premise for a narrative magazine article during Derby week.

When the idealistic girl grows up and carries a pink syringe between her manicured nails, the story takes on quite an edge.

Unfortunately, it is also true, and a real racehorse died that day.

I don't think that this story is anti-racing. It will take you somewhere at the track that you would otherwise never go and it may help you see the track vets in a new light.

We need more stories like Seth's, and fewer Tweets. A horse's life--or, in this case, death--just doesn't fit into 140 characters.

Click here to read The Final Furlong. It should also be on the newsstands by now, as it is in the May 4 edition of ESPN Magazine.


© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Big Relief: Big Brown Wins Haskell Invitational at Monmouth, Shoes Still Glued

I guess he can hold his head high again. Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner (and Belmont also-ran) Big Brown returned to form this afternoon and won the Haskell Invitational Stakes at New Jersey's Monmouth Park.

That answers one question, but opens a lot of others. Will the van take him back to Aqueduct on Long Island...or will it swerve northward toward Saratoga, where the bigger test and a rematch with his Triple Crown mates might be waiting at the Travers Stakes on August 23?

Hoof repair expert Ian McKinlay checked in today and reported that Big Brown is still wearing the glue-on Yasha shoes with thick black heel cushions.

Remember, Ian will be speaking on hoof repair and glue-on shoes on Tuesday, August 12 at the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga Springs, New York, sponsored by Life Data Labs, and again that evening in downtown Saratoga, as part of the Hoofcare@Saratoga events. Standardbred shoer Conny Svensson from the Meadowlands and racetrack surfaces researcher Dr Mick Peterson will also be speaking on the 12th.

This week, the 5th, is a program from the Grayson Jockey Club Foundation's Shoeing Committee on shoe variation and surface variation with new high-speed videos from Mitch Taylor along with Steve Norman and Bill Casner, with a guest lecture from trainer/surface expert Michael Dickinson of Maryland.

Call the office at 978 281 3222 for more information, or email saratoga@hoofcare.com. I look forward to seeing you there...and thanks! to all the blog readers who came last week.

I think most of us would like to see Big Brown in Saratoga, too.

Thanks to Steve Sherack and IEAH for the nice photo of their horse, Big Brown.

Beating a Dead Horse(shoe): Big Brown's Loose Shoe, Revisited

Photo links to ESPN's article on hind shoe revelation.


In the hours after Big Brown failed to win, or even really finish, the Belmont Stakes two weeks ago, majority owner Michael Iavorone of IEAH told the Blood Horse:

"His feet are ice cold, quarter crack not an issue. He had a very loose hind left shoe, but that’s not an issue."

Now we are left to wonder: did anyone check the right hind?

This week's Blood-Horse shows a loose shoe on what looks to be Big Brown's right hind foot...and the photo was snapped early in the race.

Please read the article on ESPN.com, and also go back and re-read the Hoof Blog's original post about the loose shoe. The Blood-Horse expose of the loose shoe is in the mail and will probably show up on their web site at some point.

The report of a loose shoe was a grave concern to me when I heard about it; some of the farriers I talked to were also quick to state that that might have been a problem, particularly with traction in the deep track. They were more concerned by a loose hind shoe than by a patched front foot.

But the Big Brown camp dismissed hind shoes as having played any role in Big Brown's uncharacteristic performance in the race of his life.

I know that someone out there will say that the closeup photo is showing a turndown style of hind shoe, but turndowns are not allowed in New York racing rules and the horse would have been spun before he even got to the paddock.

I also interviewed farrier Tom Curl, who rebuilt Big Brown's fickle feet in Florida this winter. Tom was with the horse after the Belmont. He did not consider the loose shoe to have been a performance limiting mishap when asked about it.

Of course, we'll never know what happened to Big Brown that day. The colt's not talking.

ESPN, CBS Hoof It with the Hoof Pros at New York's Belmont Park

ESPN spent a morning with Tim Shortell at Belmont Park this week. Tim, a horseshoer on the New York tracks, explained the difference between low-toes, XTs, mud calks, etc. and shod a horse for the camera. Click here to go to the ESPN site to watch the video; sorry I can't post it here. Tim looks more like Clint Eastwood every day.

Meanwhile, CBS News called Hoofcare and Lameness to track down Ian McKinlay, and once they found him, reporter Dr. Debbye Turner (she's also a veterinarian) did a weekend feature on the quarter crack specialist. They will be posting the video online. It's nice to know that CBS reporters and producers are reading this blog!