BREEDING FORUM

Posted: **Wed Apr 20, 2022 8:36 am**

In a recent paper comparing the breeze times of horses in the Breeze Up Sales over the past few years and the relationship between times and racing performance I was very surprised by one major statistic.
The paper goes into detail about the times over 1 furlong, 2 furlongs , the gallop out time and the whole Breeze time. Its really interesting work and if anyone is interested then they should get hold of a copy and give it a read. I would recommend it I really like the work these guys do trying to use stats to compare all sorts of metrics. Its desperately time consuming work and not always worth the effort but if you don’t try you never learn anything. Hats off to them for that alone.
I am not going into too much detail of the stats just to mention that there appeared to be little relationship between individual times and ratings achieved in later careers. When grouped in percentiles (small groups of like horses e.g. The top 10% or the next 15% or even the slowest 10%) there did appear to be very marginal correlation between breeze times and later performance. So if you are buying you probably need to look to which percentile your ‘target’ horse is in.
That’s all by the way. What shocked me was that even from the breeze up sales nearly 45% of horses will never run. I would have thought the number would be much less, having gone through breaking and all the early training necessary to get them to breeze. I wrongly thought that was what you paid the premium for. If you only have a slightly better than 50 / 50 of getting a runner what is the point of these sales.