By Vincent Souillat, TPD Commercial Executive
STRIDE DATA
Why is Stride Data useful?
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A horse’s speed in getting from A to B is a product of its stride, which consists of stride length and stride frequency
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During each stride, the horse takes one breath.
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For each stride taken, metabolic energy is expended for both breathing and moving the limbs
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Horses, like humans, have a certain amount of energy to deploy, thus stride characteristics are a good indicator of the optimum racing distance for each horse.
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The best striding horses cover more ground than average striding horses per unit of effort.
STRIDE LENGTH
What is stride length?
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The distance travelled per stride
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A horses limb length broadly correlates to stride length. The taller the horse, the longer the stride length (with exceptions such as Stradivarius)
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Long but infrequent strides defines the characteristics of long-distance flat horses or jumpers.
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Stride length is heavily affected by both surface speed and course topography
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Slower going and uphill sections will shorten a horse’s stride, faster ground and downhill section will do the opposite.
STRIDE FREQUENCY
What is stride frequency?
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Stride frequency, otherwise known as cadence, represents the number of strides (and therefore breaths) per second.
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Sprinters over 5f generally have a higher stride frequency than horses who run over 1 mile or further (with exceptions such as Kachy).
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To accelerate in races, elite horses tend to use both stride length and frequency in a linear fashion. Less talented horses use stride frequency over length to quicken but that comes at a higher metabolic cost, so they tire more quickly.
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As observable in the graph, the expected stride frequency decreases as the race distance increases.
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Note that some like to consider the average SF over a whole race while others prefer to assess the peak average.
PAR TIMES
What are par times?
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Thousands of races enable TPD to calculate the expected speed second by second.
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Winners can win by running efficiently or by running less inefficiently than their competitors
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Some horses will only win if pace suits their style of running as only exceptional horses can win when the pace doesn’t suit their profile
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Jockeys will try to set or follow the pace that best suits their horse on that day
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These charts run live and after the race to tell the pace story
EXAMPLE HORSE – ENABLE
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
