By Vincent Souillat, TPD Commercial Executive

STRIDE DATA

Why is Stride Data useful?

• A horse’s speed in getting from A to B is a product of its stride, which consists of stride length and stride frequency 

• During each stride, the horse takes one breath. 

• For each stride taken, metabolic energy is expended for both breathing and moving the limbs

• 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.  

• The best striding horses cover more ground than average striding horses per unit of effort. 

STRIDE LENGTH

What is stride length?

• The distance travelled per stride

• A horses limb length broadly correlates to stride length. The taller the horse, the longer the stride length (with exceptions such as Stradivarius)

• Long but infrequent strides defines the characteristics of long-distance flat horses or jumpers. 

• Stride length is heavily affected by both surface speed and course topography 

• 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?

• Stride frequency, otherwise known as cadence, represents the number of strides (and therefore breaths) per second.

• Sprinters over 5f generally have a higher stride frequency than horses who run over 1 mile or further (with exceptions such as Kachy).

• 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.

• As observable in the graph, the expected stride frequency decreases as the race distance increases.

• 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?

• Thousands of races enable TPD to calculate the expected speed second by second. 

• Winners can win by running efficiently or by running less inefficiently than their competitors

• 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

• Jockeys will try to set or follow the pace that  best suits their horse on that day

• These charts run live and after the race to tell the pace story

EXAMPLE HORSE – ENABLE

GLOSSARY OF TERMS