ARTICLE ON SPEED IN ENDURANCE by Dr David Marlin in SPORT ENDURANCE EVO MAGAZINE This is the introduction to an article that I wrote for SPORT ENDURANCE EVO magazine. You can read the full article in the current issue. Endurance as an FEI discipline began to grow significantly in the late 1990’s and has continued to grow fairly steadily in terms of the number of FEI rides on a worldwide basis since. In the 1980’s and 1990’s “championship” 160km rides were being won at speeds around 15kmh. But as endurance began to grow in the late 1990’s the speeds edged up to 17-18kmh and then in 2004-2005 there was a dramatic increase with speeds jumping up to 22-23kmh and then the 24kmh barrier was broken in 2008. The specific reasons why the speed increased are likely due to a combination of reasons including, in some cases, flatter and less hilly courses, better going, an increase in the number of horses competing, fitter horses, and an increase in competitiveness. A step change in a sport of this nature creates a number of potential problems, including the fact that rules that worked previously may no longer be effective or appropriate. As race speeds increased from 2000, there was an apparent trend to lower completion rates from 60-70% in the mid-late 1980’s to 30-40% in the 2000’s. This trend was cited as indicating poor welfare. However, non-completion cannot be assumed to indicate compromised welfare. We need to understand more about the consequences of a horse failing to complete. In 2008 I approached the FEI to ask for access to endurance records as I wanted ask the question “do low completion rates demonstrate poor welfare”. For this I looked at 120km and 160km FEI rides across all 8 regions between 2005 and 2007, inclusively. To try to avoid bias, two races were randomly selected for each region, year and distance. This gave a total of 1651 horse starts. Data was then collected, including region, month, distance, number of starters, number of finishers, number eliminated, reasons for elimination (lameness, metabolic or other) and the number of horse receiving veterinary treatment. The hypothesis (theory) was that the fewer horses finishing the more horses that would be receiving veterinary treatment. The big surprise was that rides with high completions had the HIGHEST number of horse being treated, or you could put it that eliminations are good for horse welfare. A simple conclusion from this, but not necessarily the only one, is that the veterinary examination does identify horses that are compromised and that if those horses are removed from races, then they are less likely to be seriously injured and less likely to require treatment.........................See magazine for full article
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 08:51:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015