More Trainer Analysis

Permanent injury rate per year/average no. of breeze-races per month

33%/8.00 O'Gorman

35%/3.54 Catherine Day Phillips

43%/3.33 D.Wayne Lukas

50%/2.98 Mark Hennig

50%/3.00 Bruce Jackson

50%/3.00 Todd Plecher

50%/3.4 Bongo Racing Stable

55%/??? Kiarin McGlaughlin

55%/??? Mark Casse

55%/3.25 Joan Scott

62%/4.00 Richard Mandella

65%/???Reade Baker

65%/Mr or Ms. Average American Conventional Trainer

69%/3.25 Linda Rice

75%/2.88 Doug O'Neill

Most of the above average around three speed events per month, a little more or a little less, and average between a 50-65% permanent injury rate per year. Before I began looking at trainer stats I'd long ago pegged Reade Baker and Doug O'Neill, just by looking at photos of their horses, watching their horses disappear and watching them race as problematical trainers. Unsurprising then that these are near the bottom of the injury stats.

Last post, however, noted that the 3 speed events/month+ is gotten in different ways in different barns. And also that O'Gorman by his recommended training program for older horses notes the importance of an accumulation of works, averaged, instead of a specific definite protocol. My opinion is that scheduling matters in the sense that trainers doing speed work every nine days are more problematical than trainers doing every 7 days and skipping a week here and there.

Can we make any firm conclusions from the above stats? I think that one is fairly obvious. If you want to achieve the O'Gorman type injury rate of 33%, you are going to fail at that if you are doing speed work 3 times or slightly better a month. Only Day-Phillips achieves this and she does so by averaging 4 times a month for several months in her early program.

Put it another way: To optimize the injury rate and keep it as low as possible the stats say that speed work 3 or slightly 3+/month will fail to work!

Can this be stated in a positive manner? If we had 10 O'Gorman trainers that were all getting 33% injury rate, then we could conclude that someone doing the same speed work as O'Gorman would get his injury rate, everything else being equal. However, and unfortunately, we have only O'Gorman that seems to do speed work more than 4 times a month--and thus we are unable to say definitively based on the stats that O'Gorman training is responsible for his low injury rate. Although, please keep in mind that there's much more info including info on this blog, that tends to point in the O'Gorman direct.

A final statement as to what the trainer stats show us in terms of frequency of speed events and fracture resistance (FR) next post.

Training:

Tues: 1/18: Off. misheard the forcast and thought the snow was coming in today. Too bad, as wee needed to go this day.

Wed. 1/19 and Thurs. 1/20: Off. Accuweather shows 7 inches of snow. Up north at the farm I'd say close to 10 inches. They've revised the -8 temps up to 2 degrees but also revised a nice extended forcast downward so that the snow will be around to end of Jan. Shades of last year. Maybe we can figure out how to do something in the paddock when it warms up in a couple of days.