Toe Grabs

Ask a trainer why they put toe grabs on horses and they'll tell you it's done so that the horse can get a hold of the racing surface. All the trainers when I started were racing with grabs, and I never heard anybody question the practice until I read Tom Iver's 1983 book "The Fit Race Horse".

Ivers it appeared was mental on toe grabs considering them a signficant factor in the injury equation. What was this anyway? Someone considering the injury effect on the horse of a piece of equipment? By Ivers, grabs delay turnover, contribute to fatigue, play unnatural forces on all the suspensory aparatus including the sesamoids. Ivers had nothing good to say about toe grabs, and, by the same token shoes without grabs play just the opposite, according to Ivers. Under this influence early on I raced horses in Queens plates(a horseshoe without toe grabs).

In the late nineteen eighties and early nineties there were some studies in support of Iver's position. Was it Texas A&M Vet School? Somewhere. Some Vet, still around, studied grabs, did some slow motion camera work to prove the turnover problem, provided some stats and physics. Grabs are trouble according to this big study and some later smaller one's in California, all indicated a significantly higher injury rate for horses wearing grabs, never mind where they found horses racing without grabs.

As a horse racing novice I bought into this line of thought. Problem was I also had a set of eyes, and over a period of time I became a little weary of watching my highly conditioned runners going full blast down the straightaway getting caught and passed by faster horses running in grabs.

Following a couple such occurrances and a few resulting RR uhmms and ahhhs, I started paying more attention to my runner's stride efficiency in Queens and Queens XTs noticing that they seemed ok on the morning training surface, but, in the afternoon my horses were slipping and sliding in the deeper racing surface compared to the surefooted horses motoring down the stretch in regular grabs.

After commencing to watch stride and turnover of numerous horses, eyeballing hoofs as they made their way down the track, I observed for myself what I consider the first lie of the toe grab studies. I was unable to see visually where toe grabs were impeding turnover whatsoever. In fact, the horses I closely observed seemed to have more solid, more efficient strides at speed than my horses in Queens which seemed more to feel their way down the track.*

This and other observations put my mind into transition on the subject of toe grabs. I was getting deeper into racing and beginning to identify numerous injury causes having nothing at all to do with horse shoes. In this light, some Vet doing a study and declaring that toe grabs cause injuries started to look a little weak.

I also was reading the new (and superb, by the way) farrier bulletin boards at www.horseshoes.com where some of the top farriers post. I found a good one in Tom Stovall CJF, a respected farrier with a website carrying well reasoned article written by Tom about grabs. You can google "Tom Stovall" to get the site and the article. Tom advocates grabs on the rear and grabless on the fronts for reasons of physics which he outlines, a configuration I disagree with as you'll see next post.

By 2000 I was deep enough into the toe grab debate that I began to experiment with various horseshoes on my own horses at Eureka Downs. I used my best horse Aylward as guinea pig prior to a series races where he ran three times first and one second in four consecutive races. During this period and just prior to the first race we tried various shoe combos and evaluated them each over a two week period, as follows:

Fronts: Queens XTs
Rear: Thoro'bred Racing Plate Low Toes

Fronts: Low Toes
Rear: Low Toes

Fronts: Low Toes
Rear: Regular Toes

Fronts: Regular Toes
Rear: Regular Toes

My horse Groovin' Wind contributed to the experiment with level grips on all four. Results of my own on track toe grab studies, next post.

*Ease of turnover" depends somewhat on speed. Front grabs tend more to impede turnover at slow speeds than fast.

Today's Training to be posted: what I saw this morning in the 20 degree weather with our injured hoof was anything but pretty. I'll give a report on this later after I have a little more time to absorb what I saw.