With his career on the slopes nearing its twilight, Olympic skier Bode Miller has slowly been integrating himself into the world of thoroughbred racing over the past few years. Last fall, Miller revealed he acquired a farm in Kentucky to be the home base of what he hopes will evolve into a successful breeding program.
Yesterday, his horseman metamorphosis took a major step forward when the gold medalist announced the purchase of a barn at the Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland. In an interview with Bloodhorse’s Frank Angst, Miller dished out the details on his training program, which he describes as a “new approach to training thoroughbreds.”
If you look at what is going on now, the training is all pretty standardized. Every horse is subjected to the same routine and the better horses kind of come out on top. The problem is that any system that’s based on fitting every single horse into it, ends up undershooting a large percentage of horses and overshooting a large percentage of horses.”
While Miller does not have immediate plans to apply for a training license, he has assembled a team of experienced horsemen to help him implement his plan. Miller also noted that he’s enlisting the services of Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen, a physician who has developed and managed training programs for numerous Olympians, including Miller.
With Dr. Stray-Gundersen’s expertise, Miller’s program will be a combination of modern, data-driven sports science and hands-on horsemanship. Miller intends to renovate the stalls at Fair Hill to incorporate a more controlled training environment which includes working his horses on treadmills to boost aerobic fitness. The goal is to maximize each horse’s athletic potential while minimizing injuries.
“What we do with horses right now is truly ridiculous…We sit them in the stall 23 1/2 hours, let them run once a day at about a two-thirds pace, then work them once every seven to 10 days. That’s too long between works for a residual effect; it’s well outside the window to where you’d have a cumulative training effect which is more like three or four days. So you totally miss the cumulative training effect. Instead, working every seven to 10 days creates a cumulative negative effect on the structure: bones, ligaments, tendons. Over time you get cumulative stress fractures, calcium deposits, those types of things.”
If Miller’s goal is to shake up the standard routine, he’s in the right place. Horsemen at Fair Hill can utilize the facility’s 350 rolling acres to send horses out for slow cross-country gallops in addition to the standard track training. A far cry from life on the backside of the racetrack. Miller plans to keep his operation relatively small—around 30 horses in training at a time—to ensure each athlete gets the attention they need.
“The horsemanship side has to take precedence over the science side, but both sides have to respect one another.”
Miller’s grand vision will undoubtedly face plenty of scrutiny within the industry. Horse racing, like most horse sports, is notoriously rigid in its methodology…
“Get ‘em fit and run ‘em.”
“If the horse ain’t fit, rest ‘em.”
“Want to win, get faster horses.”
Take a look at a racing program some time and you will see just how uniformed training programs are from barn to barn.
5 furlong breeze around the oval last month…5 furlong breeze on the track last week…4 furlong dash this week. Jog in between…
There are of course numerous exceptions and nuances, but there’s certainly no reason not to question whether the enduring “old-boot” approach to conditioning is still the optimal way. If the data shows that working horses on a treadmill does in fact keep horses fitter and healthier, there will probably be an equine treadmill boom in training centers across the country. At the end of the day however, it will be difficult to move past the overriding notion that in order to be successful in this business, you must have the horse. As Bob Baffert said repeatedly during American Pharoah’s Triple Crown run, “A horse like this makes my job easy.”
The same questions remain:
Is it really possible to revolutionize horse training? Do race horses fail or get injured because of how they’re trained, or is it a consequence of how they’re bred? Or, is it due to some previously undetected issue, or just plain old bad luck that can strike any athlete at any time?
These are the million dollar questions Miller hopes to answer.
www.horsecollaborative.com/bode-miller-racehorse-training/#
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