The Lukas Stable and the Injury Rate

Understanding the extent of the injury problem in thoroughbred racing is necessary before going to the interrelationship between training and injuries. I've characterized the injury problem as the dirty secret of conventional training, and made the bold though statistically unsupported assertion that almost every conventional trainer injures everything in their shed row, most within four months of arrival.

The rate of career ending injuries per year is surmised (and again unsupported statistically) at a frightful 65% per year. If those stats are correct why really would an owner with average pockets invest their money in horse racing? Well, since I've been in the last 20 years, the owners, that is one unrelated to the track or to some farm, in my area are virtually non-existent. I'm suspecting that a similar situation occurs in the rest of the country, though it is unknown to me. I know of but two non-farm related owners in the KCMO area in thoroughbreds. That would be Dr. Reed and his Perfect Drift and my retiring friend RM.

For closer looks I again go to Ross Staaden's book "Winning Trainers" and the complete research job on the D. Wayne Lukas Stable of the late 1980s. It is a superb, comprehensive look at this trainer, his talent and his methods and results, much of it from the trainer's own mouth, and those around him. The photo above shows Charismatic in the Lukas shedrow after the Belmont as the coming red flag.

Staaden writes at that time that career ending injury stats are unavailable and difficult to determine because horses are retired often for reasons unknown. And certainly, few trainers statistically track less severe injuries. Staaden believes that Lukas's injury stats are average and so do i. I'm predicting that average is other than a pretty. We'll see.

Lukas showed Staaden the training logs for all the horses in his Santa Anita stable for the month of June and I am assuming the year was 1988. It could have been 1989. Staaden then copied those logs and added to it all races of each horse in the stable for the entire year.

From this work we know what the horses did on the track, and very importantly, how many times they raced for the entire year, and also what they earned and how many races they won.

From this we can extrapolate the averages for the entire stable as to number of races per horse per year and number of horses who failed to make it through the year. I have yet to compile these stats as I write this. It should be interesting.

1/24/07: Day 2: 15 min. trot-walk-gallop under 30 lbs astride, mostly it was slow 20 sec/f gallop. 15 min under tack followed.
1/25/07: Day 3: cancelled. overtrained yesterday. Rest.
1/26/07: Day 3 try again: last two days have been decent temp. wise. tomorrow its back into the deep freeze. just warm enough to melt the snow and leave the pasture hard as a rock. the paddock was a sea of mud, both hardly conducive to a day 3 fast work. We forged ahead however. Best we could hope for was a pasture romp over the hard surface. Declined the Astride on this. Horses were hepped but hesitant understandably to gallop out. We got a few sort of spurts, basically a wasted day, but we got in some work which would set up another fast work in two days. Nob declined to shoe the other foot as except for the frog it had failed to grow at all. Horse today measures at slightly over 15'2". I swear he has shrunk.