Pedigree details

[mathare]

The Racing Post gives pedigree details such as these for Arc winner Rail Link:

Dansili (8.3f) - Docklands(USA) (Theatrical(10.9f))

What are the values in brackets, 8.3f and 10.9f?

[vegyjones]

The length of the horses!

[Win2Win]

I never bother breeding.....I mean look at Vegy.....his parents where baboons and still managed to produce an illiterate dung beetle :D

As far as I know they are just a measure of the average distance the horse was good at to give an idea of the offsprings stamina, which is a load of Rolex out of pattern company.

[mathare]

Thanks Keith, I wondered if it was something like that

[TheOldhamWhisper]

Not certain, but I think the figure is actually the average winning distance of the progeny. As many Dams have few (if any) races, the Dam-Sire progeny are used for that side of the family. It is always worth checking to see if the progeny of specific lines follow the 'average' - quite often there are pairings that produce routers from horses which would normally produce sprinters (and vice versa).

[mathare]

So only wins count do they Oldham?

[TheOldhamWhisper]

That was the way I perceived it, but as I said - I'm not certain!

[mathare]

That was the way I perceived it, but as I said - I'm not certain!It certainly makes sense and good enough for me. The reason I asked is because I had been looking at the pedigree of a few horses and noticed that some of the sires and dams had this info after their name so wondered what it meant.

I suppose in the example given that we could perhaps expect the horse to look best over a mile to a mile and a half. Of course the horse in question here is Rail Link who won the Arc over 12f and has competed over 11f and 12f all his career.

In fact his RP details also state that he is related to a few horses who have done well over 10f.

Why do dams tend to have so few races anyway? To my uneducated mind it makes sense to see if the dam can cut it on the racecourse before turning her into a foal factory. After all you don't want to mix super stallion DNA with dud mare DNA do you?

[TheOldhamWhisper]

Why do dams tend to have so few races anyway? To my uneducated mind it makes sense to see if the dam can cut it on the racecourse before turning her into a foal factory. After all you don't want to mix super stallion DNA with dud mare DNA do you?

It is widely believed that the Sire genes are the ones that matter - which is why many pedigree lines show the dominant sides (ie Sire/Dam/Dam-Sire although some also go as far as to include Dam's Dam-Sire too!).

http://www.tbheritage.com/ is probably one of the best sites around to study bloodlines (although it hasn't been updated for a while :( )

[Win2Win]

Dams only generally need to win once before trotting off to the paddocks, as they can only drop one kid a year :) So there generally isn't an average to get for the ladies.