The Injury Rate Determined

Can we make generalizations about the training injury rate across the country, and how is this to be done?

As used so far in the blog the term"Injury rate" refers to career enders. Obviously we have all sorts of lesser injuries at any given moment on the race track.

We are to my knowledge without any statistical evidence as to career ending injury rates across the board though it's coming, and so, on career enders we make educated guesses.

However, plenty of information is available as to how many horses at a given point in time probably have debilitating injuries keeping them from racing and training. In this post I'd like to outline some methods, and then the conclusions.

A number of methods will indicate how many horses on the backstretch at a given moment are injured and unable to race or train.

1. Handicapping: I first became aware of the injury rate in my handicapping days. How many horses that raced the first week of the meet are still racing by the end, or in the next year?
2. Personal observation: two aspects to this:
a. micro: the trainer with the 20 horses in the shedrow down the alleyway. How many of them actually are racing? How many make it back next year?
b. macro: how many horses at the facility appear to be racing? Is it "most" of them, just a few or something in between?
3. Horses galloping in the morning: There are any number of reasons horses avoid the track in the morning, but, when there are innumerable horses out in the morning as at the beginning of meets, what does this tell us generally about horse health at the facility?.
4. Number of races participations per meet compared to number of horses on track: this stat speaks volumes.
5. Owner drop out and participation in the sport.
6. News reports of industry concerns.
7. Local and regional statistic keeping.
8. Racing numbers related to the size of the field.

Probably there are other means that I'm failing to recall or am unawares. But, believe this is enough to do more guesswork, next post.

Training: Last three days are rests due to weather. Hope to have something to report tomorrow.