Doug O'Neill Conclusions

Spend A Buck watchers have had a long wait to Einstein as a stallion to carry on Spend A Buck and Buckpasser. Sometimes it takes a while. Meanwhile, performing about as expected, Zito without steroids.

Zito and O'Neill train similarly--breezing every 8-10 days, galloping every other day, though Zito has been known to gallop daily. Heirs of Lukas, probably, while lacking Lukas's intelligence and attention to detail. Lukas had a feel for athletics that you'll have a tough time finding on O'Neill's website, if you have this understanding. Similarly, I'd invite anyone to take a walk through Zito's barn (as I did in 1998), and try to find any evidence the guy focuses on conditioning or training athletes.

We might say simply that the breeze/race every 8-10 days thing fails to work in terms of injury prevention. That would be one finding of our inquiry. Horses that work this infrequently get hurt to the tune of 50% every three months.

However, before concluding this hypothesis as scientific fact it is necessary to take a look at the usual list of exculpations of my O'Neill interview. Even though I took all of the three 20 horse O'Neill samples as actuallyracing horses in prime race season (as opposed to breaking or preparing), some of the O'Neill excuses listed in the interview are nevertheless valid, and we'd have to say that an unknown part of the 50% injury rate is attributable to other factors besides the training.

This point is clarified if we consider exactly what percentage might be injured every three months in perfect training conditions. If our training program meticulously takes note of everything we know about equine exercise physiology, what might we expect every three months in terms of injury?

We're without any samples of this, even in my own barn as I'm still flailing around. So we guess again, taking into account inherent fragility in our trainees. On this the blog has metaphored before: walking on egg shells, egg membranes...horse puts on that smuggness causing extraordinary workout just before the inevitable injury. Keeping them healthy, whatever we do, is very very tough.

But, we make a guess at a percentage figure, and, let's presume like O'Neill that we're training 300 horses this year, I'd think regardless of care about 25% of them will receive some injury every three months.

This puts O'Neill's, and by extrapolation Zito, and all those that wait 8-10 days between works, in a different light with their 50% injury rate, i.e. they injure only 25% more than ideal training. Given the difficulties of ideal training as pointed out in the O'Neill interview, things in O'Neill's and (close pin over nose) Zito's barn look a bit less nefarious.

But, I'll avoid belaboring this at this point as we're talking about injury prevention instead of performance. Let us conclude for the moment that waiting 8 days to breeze a horse is too long in terms of injury prevention. Many do better (I think), but, we'll have to take a look in the coming posts.

Training:
Thurs. 11/27: After yesterday's riderless speedwork: Art gallops 1.7 miles. Rod: trot-gallops 1.7 miles, probably half of it gallop. Rod does much better with his tack work today.
Fri. 11/28: With bad weather blowing in we want to do 1.7 miles of tack followed by riderless short full speed bursts. The best laid plans go awry when the horses with the 13 yr. old as ringleader commence a 10 minute run as we try to get them in the paddock, much of it fairly fast. Basically, there went the tack work. With the weather--3 days of rain predicted--I'm determined to do the speed work. We never do get the 13 yr. old in the paddock, which proves a mistake, as the two youngsters simply refuse to run fast without him. They are more into playing and pimping each other than running. Here's how it goes: I'd decided by this time on a riderless mile work as fast as I could make them go. I was myself having to sprint the diagonals of the paddock to keep 'em into it and 4f into it I realized I'd never make it to 8f, and so, stop to rest and complete recover. At this time the trainer himself needs to be in better condition. Decided to revert to short spurts, and we probably did something like 3 x3f thereafter. Both horses looked like pigs doing this work, completely contradicting my last post we I'd noted what great shape they were in. We really needed the 13 yr. old in there to lead the way. Thereafter Art escaped the farm and chased mares at the neighbors for 1/2 hour before we were able to coral him. Art had plenty of energy at the neighbor's. It's that time of year. The 13 yr. old was worked in the dark for 3 miles in hopes he'd quit chasing Art over the fence. After today I questioned myself: am I training them hard enough?