With the recent thoroughbred birthday meaning a new batch of two-year-old racehorses, many trainers are seeing their stables fill with these youngsters in preparation for the looking 2YO races.
As this time rolls around each year, trainers are presented a difficult balancing act to keep their potential runner on the track to debut.
The balancing act we are talking about is that of giving the horses enough work and galloping to be fit to race while keeping them sound and healthy in spite of their juvenile skeletal structure.
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Bone is quite amazing – it is dynamic and remodels in response to stimuli. It’s constantly being reabsorbed, manufactured and remodelled. And the stimulus to trigger new bone formation is stress or mechanical load and the most remodelling occurs along the lines of greatest load.
When a horse is educated and starts carrying weight you can see some of this remodelling take place. Then when a horse then commences fast work more remodelling occurs. The bones respond to the stress of exercise and become thicker, denser and stronger where they need to.
This natural process only becomes a hot topic when the first 2YO runner of the season publicly pulls up “shin sore” after its debut or a potential runners returns to the paddock for a spell before making it to the racetrack.
Shin soreness is described as having “pain on palpation or pressure to the front of the cannon bone”. It generally presents after a gallop. Watch the video below to see Kris Lees talking about Saganaki’s shin soreness.
The cannon bone (shin) is the bone between the knee and the fetlock (ankle) in the horse’s front leg and takes up to 60% of the load in a galloping horse.
This bone is like a hollow column structure and in galloping the load is taken by the front of the bone. So when commencing fast work, the bone needs to adapt and strengthen in this area. This process continues to occur in horses for the first three years of its life in response to increasing loads.
So herein lies the balancing act for a trainer.
A cannon bone cannot be fully adapted for galloping until it has had exposure to that level of stress. It must be trained not just matured. And a young runner that has a limited campaign as a 2YO might end up falling shin sore as a 3YO as the bone was not trained during their time as a 2YO.
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