Mike Ferrara wrote:I haven't had much involvement in racing and the experience I do have was many years ago, so I'm just asking questions.
What about speed? Do horses (or some horses on some surfaces) go faster with grabs on the front? While they might not do much pulling with the front, they sure seem to push with the front once the front end gets over center, don't they?
Along the same lines, what about stability? On surfaces where traction is needed to keep the horses chin out of the dirt, don't we often add traction to both ends?
In an effort to bring everybody up to speed:
Years ago back when Mr Stovall was still swaging steel and shoeing for Travis and Crockett;) The 4mm grab now known as the low or more recently California toe was then known as the regular toe. The 2mm or XLT was then known as the low toe. Follow so far? Good.
Enter into the picture the Louisiana Grab. This thing was used mostly in QH racing. When many former QH trainers made the transition to TBs they brought this thing with them. I will agree with Mr Stovall that
the LA grab is ridiculous and never should have been allowed on any horse anywhere
What manufacturers did when tooling up to produce these things was to split the difference between a LA grab and a regular. Thus, this new in between size (which was still too big) became the regular toe. The regular then became the low and so forth.
Essentially all the original JC recommendations were trying to do was to get things back to the way they ought to be. California as always dove headfirst into it in banning anything bigger than 4mm on front. JC at last minute changed their recommendation to nothing higher than 2mm. Unintended consequence was CA having biggest grabs in country when they tried to have lowest. Go figure. It is unclear to anybody why JC decided on 2mm last minute like that but they have now reversed themselves on it due to I suspect cheating with outer rims, or in case of Delaware whining from one influential trainer.
Proper use of front toe grabs involves a young horse being shod with them immediately, being brought along slowly and conditioned to them from the beginning keeping close attention paid to Wolff's Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff's_law
Train a horse without grabs then suddendly put them on when he's working fast and sure as God wrote it on a rock you'll have leg problems for sure.
Like anything else it's a tool. It must be understood and used properly. Is too much to ask of most contemporary hot walker turned trainers unfortunately.
As far as making the horse run faster I don't know. Yes Secretariat wore them but around the backside we often say "horses don't set speed records track superintendents do". There are entirely too many variables to consider.
I will venture to say that the synthetic surfaces are a miserable failure as far as increased safety goes. It made a financial killing for the individuals who pushed the stuff though. Thankfully no more tracks are considering changing over to it anymore to my knowledge anyway.
In addition to what Mr Stovall said about the drugs I'll add this- Claiming races by their very nature are an insurmountable problem as well. If a decent trainer decides to do right by a horse, usually he'll be doing it for someone else's benefit. This is one of the reasons so many horses are running hurt.
George