Page 92 - April 2017

HOW DOES GELDING A
HORSE IMPACT
PERFORMANCE?
“I think that gelding a horse can only be a positive, regarding performance.”
by Heather Smith Thomas
Some horsemen think stallions have more competitive drive than geldings and might out-perform a gelding on the racetrack. Others believe that gelding a good horse only makes him better.
Bill Casner of Flower Mound, Texas, has worked
with racehorses all his life and says geldings almost always outperform stallions, yet most horsemen are hesitant to geld their prospective racehorses. “I’ve been on a number of boards and committees like the TOBA (Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association) and Breeders’ Cup committees and have always been an advocate of giving geldings a weight allowance. They give mares and fillies a weight allowance, so why not a gelding? This would cre- ate an incentive to have more geldings racing,” he says.
“Right now, everybody is thinking they need to race stallions. With the high value of good stallions, people always have the dream that their stallion is the next Storm Cat or American Pharoah. But in truth, cutting a horse will generally improve his performance. In my mind,
it never has a negative effect on performance. Geldings still secrete a lot of natural testosterone anyway. Gelding them simply makes their neck and shoulders trimmer; they don’t get heavy on the front end, and they are more streamlined—which is an advantage in a racehorse.”
Ironically, the gelding will develop a better hip. If you geld a horse at a young age before puberty, he will typically grow taller than he would be if left as a stallion. “The growth plates in the long bones stay open longer (since they tend to start closing at puberty) and the horse becomes taller,” says Casner. This may give him a longer reach and a better stride when he’s running.
“I think that gelding a horse can only be a positive, regarding performance,” Casner continued. “If a horse has conformational faults, he should be gelded anyway (rather than have him siring foals), yet many people won’t cut him. No one wants to breed to that horse anyway after they come and look at him and see his faults. A horse might have an incredible pedigree, so people won’t cut him. They keep trying to make him into a racehorse or think he’ll be a good sire, but he doesn’t live up to their expectations.
“Maybe it’s Einstein’s law of insanity or something like that, but people keep running the horse thinking he’s going to improve. That horse will tell you pretty quick if he’ll actually run or not.
“We have a horse named Colonel Sampson that
just turned three and he won his last two races in top performances. When he was a yearling, we put him in the Keeneland sale and put a $20,000 reserve on him and there were no bids. He was a big horse with soft pasterns
and sickle hocks. Nobody wanted him. So, I brought him to Texas and the first thing I did was cut him. He didn’t have the pedigree to be a stallion.
“We cut him and started breaking him. The first
time I took him out in the arena where we could actually watch him move, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, can this horse move!’ He outgrew the sickle hocks and his rear end was a lot better. He kept growing and the angles in his hind legs improved. The horse’s legs grow from the ground up, and the top part is the last to grow. Colonel Sampson grew out of his poor conformation and became a really nice horse. He won a stakes race at Golden Gate, people noticed, and the phone started ringing. We sold 3/4-interest in him for a lot more than the $20,000 we’d hoped for at the sale! Becoming a gelding made all the difference for him.”
Funny Cide, who won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes in 2003, is another good example. “We bred him at WinStar. He was one of Distorted Humor’s first crop of foals. We sent the mares to New York to
be foaled out, so he was technically a New York bred horse and we sent him to the New York Select Sales. He brought about $22,000 and we wouldn’t have sold him if we thought he’d actually be a Derby horse. After he won the Kentucky Derby, we all went back through our notes because we really couldn’t remember that horse! That’s how non-descript he was as a youngster. I’d given him about a B-minus in my evaluation, he wasn’t spectacular at all,” says Casner.
The people who bought that horse as a yearling gelded him. Thus, he had a chance to grow more before he
fully matured. Conditioner Barclay Tagg saw the horse training as a 2 year old and liked the way he moved and bought Funny Cide for $70,000 (for Sackatoga Stable). “That horse would never have won the Kentucky Derby for us because we would not have cut him.” But, gelding Funny Cide was what made all the difference for him, not only in enhancing his performance, but also his behavior.
“He was a little like John Henry, the famous gelding with an exceptionally long racing career; he was a tough
Since geldings secrete a lot of natural testosterone, their necks and shoulders are trimmer, they are more streamlined, and they don’t get heavy on the front end – which can be an advantage in a racehorse.
TESTOSTERONE
90 SPEEDHORSE, April 2017
EQUINE HEALTH