There can no longer be much doubt that today’s Thoroughbred is not nearly as sound or durable as its ancestors of past decades–when racehorses often raced over a hundred times in their careers, while working two or three times a week. The media dramatized the fatal breakdowns of Barbaro and Eight Belles on national TV, but the greater problem is the rank-and-file racehorses who can no longer race long enough to pay their bills. Although today’s racehorses surely don’t get the foundation of long, slow works they once did, I’m afraid they have grown too fragile as a breed to withstand the grueling training schedules of their fore-bearers.

While many of today’s Kentucky Derby starters are not sound enough even to finish their three-year-old campaigns, this was hardly the case after Exterminator won the Kentucky Derby of 1918, then went on to race 100 times, winning fifty races, 33 of them stakes. Seabiscuit raced an incredible 35 times as a two-year-old in 1935, and he was just getting warmed up! Citation won the Kentucky Derby on three days rest, before capturing the Triple Crown and 19 wins in 1948. Today’s Thoroughbreds couldn’t do this if their life depended on it. (And unfortunately it sometimes does.)

Shortcuts in modern training methods are likely not the only reason for this growing frailty, however. There are still a good many veteran trainers in their seventies and eighties who surely have the wherewithal to use those traditional methods if they were rewarded on the racetrack. But we no longer see horses working twice a week, or racing twice a month for many years. As Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham said of the horses of his youth, “Those horses were built like Russian tanks.” A survey by Washington Post columnist Andrew Beyer in the 1990s reported that he didn’t find a single prominent trainer who didn’t feel there had been a significant decline in soundness and durability in the breed.

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