SoylentNews

American Pharoah Beats Science to Win Triple Crown

posted by takyon on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:14PM   
from the trot-like-an-egyptian dept.

Hugh Pickens writes:

There are some good reasons it's been 37 years since the last triple-crown winner as Lexi Pandell wrote on June 3 that post-race recovery is no joke for a thousand-pound animal that can run more than 40 miles per hour. There are two weeks between the Derby and the Preakness, and three weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont. That tight schedule—and the super-specific needs of racehorses—means horses competing in the grueling back-to-back-to-back Triple Crown races have a big disadvantage against fresh horses. First, as a horse races, its muscles produce lactic acid. In humans, glycogen recoup takes about 24 hours. But horses take several days to process lactic acid and restore glycogen reserves. Trainers make sure their charges drink plenty of water and sometimes even use intravenous fluids to aid that repair process. Secondly, in addition to being the last race of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes is also the longest. That's no easy feat, even for a racehorse. When a horse runs a tough race (or has a new workout at a longer distance), its muscles break down. Then, during rest, they reknit and adapt. A horse that has skipped the Preakness, however, has the luxury of time. Mubtaahij, who some picked to win the Belmont, had plenty of rest so he could be pushed for hard workouts two weeks prior to the Belmont.

Finally, at different points in its stride, a galloping horse puts all its weight on a single leg. That limb bears three times more weight than usual when galloping on a straightaway and, thanks to centrifugal force, a load five to 10 times greater on turns. This translates to skeletal microdamage. Race a horse during that critical period and you increase the risk of serious injuries mid-race. Two weeks [seven years] ago, vets were forced to euthanize the promising gray thoroughbred filly, Eight Belles, when she collapsed on the track after completing the race at Churchill Downs, suffering from two shattered ankles in her front legs. A fresh horse won't face any of those problems. Even a horse that ran in the Derby but skipped the Preakness will have five weeks to rest, and plenty of time for normal skeletal damage to repair, before the Belmont. "So, American Pharoah [sic], it'd be awesome if you win the Triple Crown, but you probably won't," concluded Pandell. "It's not your fault. It's science and those pesky fresh horses." Science was wrong.

[Ed note: The proper spelling of the title for an ancient Egyptian king is "Pharaoh." This ABC News story American Pharoah Rides Misspelled Name to Brink of History notes the registered name for the horse is "American Pharoah" and provides some background on how that came to be.]

---

Original submission

• Did they consider the data? Did they consider the data? (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @01:48AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @01:48AM (#193457)

  I see a list of 12 winners in the last 100 years, so this is something that happens about once every ten years. That is not so rare...
  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Crown_of_Thoroughbred_Racing [wikipedia.org]

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1

• Re:Did they consider the data? Re:Did they consider the data? (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday June 08 2015, @07:08AM

  by Magic Oddball (3847) on Monday June 08 2015, @07:08AM (#193548) Journal

  That's if you average them out, which completely ignores that all of the wins took place in a few clusters. The actual years, grouped by decade:
  1919

  1930
  1935
  1937

  1941
  1943
  1946
  1948

  1973
  1977
  1978

  Parent

  • Re:Did they consider the data? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @07:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @07:41PM (#193782)

    Still it's not so rare that we would expect horses to be breaking their legs, etc over it. The clustering reminds me of the high jump records :

    At a high school track meet in 1963, an athlete from Oregon changed the face of high jumping by falling, figuratively and literally, into a new technique.1 Dick Fosbury had struggled to clear even modest heights using the “Western Roll,” the popular technique at the time, in which the athlete extends his chest over the bar. After several embarrassing performances, Fosbury reverted to an antiquated scissors technique in which he simply hurdled sideways over the bar. On one attempt, he leaned back, thrusting his hips over the bar, and landing on his back. Not only did he clear the bar, but with subsequent jumps, he began to exaggerate this technique, fully throwing his back over the bar. By the end of the tournament, he had increased his personal record by half a foot. Although this improvement initially brought him up to the level achieved by top performers who were using the Western Roll, Fosbury went on to refine the technique over subsequent years, with his crowning achievement being a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Within a few years, nearly all jumpers had adopted the technique that to this day bears his name, the Fosbury Flop.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22329960 [nih.gov]

    So there is probably some new strategy or technique that gets adopted to kick off each cluster. If I was betting the next few years it would be on favorite.

    Parent