A Special Role No More: TBs In Sport Horse Breeding

I don't agree with all of it as well but enjoyed reading it
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Tom you have left out the stallion Flexable as an ISH with TB dam sire ( Cruising out of Flex by Safarixx)
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He is well within the top 250 rankings.
 
dont agree and as said below seems to have missed out some!!!imo

quote Tom you have left out the stallion Flexable as an ISH with TB dam sire ( Cruising out of Flex by Safarixx)
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He is well within the top 250 rankings.

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Many thanks.

Flexable's damsire is not recorded in the WBFSH rankings (June 2008). It is the responsibility of each studbook to ensure that the sire, dam and damsire of each international competitor is reported to the WBFSH each year.
 
As always, interesting article Tom!

Do you think that there is almost an increasing divergence in the type of TB that is likely to be most successful in the racing world, and those (maybe more trainable, more hind leg engagement, more bone ...) that many of the top studs on the continent are still choosing to buy in to add "blood" to their breeding? Notable are Chase the Ace, Stravinsky, Amiro Z (and I know you weren't keen on him from his photo, but he has just had 2 of his foals from first years progeny in the top 10 at the Z Foal Gradings, and won the 4 year old stallion class .... so he is beginning to prove himself!) - not to speak of the contents of your liquid nitrogen tank .... So there are still a number of TB stallions that are important contributors to WB studbooks. And the progeny of many others are still scoring successes - for instance the damsire of my yearling, Able Albert, good old Irish TB who last year (I think) was one of the top eventing sires in the US, posthumously, and was important in contributing to enhancing the quality of the KWPN breeding programme; Master Imp .... could go on. Don't think that they are being phased out quite yet, though!
 
I don't really know enough about sport-horse breeding to judge whether or not you are right about the role of TBs, but the article is fascinating, and it's good to see a controversial view put forward with some scientific evidence to back it up, as opposed to just vague opinion.

If there is a need for 'fresh blood' in WB breeding (and I accept that there may not be), what would be your view on using Arab blood rather than TB? Not just any old Arab blood, obviously, but specifically the very big-moving (mainly Russian) lines, with the elevated action needed for dressage?

Just a thought!
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Well I am not a SH person, however I will say one thing for Tom's piece, he may not be too far wrong; it happened with the Quarter Horse Association; only the more popular purebred AQHAs can go in the Regular registry, any mare bred to a TB is placed in the Appendix registry; which right now is under the AQHA umbrella but I can see it becoming its own entity at some point in the future.

Interesting read though, even for a non-sport horse person.
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But unless it's changed VERY recently (last year or two) with the AQHA if an Appendix horse earns enough points in open AQHA competition (they show on equal footing) it can become a full fledged AQHA and if bred back to a TB its offspring can go into the Appendix book and start the cycle again! The requirement used to be and may still be 10 points, which isn't that much for a horse that does much competing at all. I know fully papered AQHA horses, especially HUS bred ones, that are more than half TB. (It works both ways - TB mare or stallion.)

I don't have the data to properly refute or agree but I will say the trends in flat race breeding, especially in North America, have gone a long way to cutting the TBs out of the top end sport market. The traditional "jumping lines" - Princequillo, Turn To etc - tended to be heavier, turf bred and distance horses that looked more like what we would call modern sport horses. But the trend towards early speed and horses to run on surfaces has really changed the phenotype of TBs in general, not to mention that those old lines are dying out because they don't play the modern games.

The TBs I know that excel as sport producers tend to a) hark back to the older type and b) look the part. Of course this is less of a problem here, where jump racing continues the demand for more all around athletes but even there, look at the rise of fast hurdlers . . .
 
Really interesting, TarrSteps - and I guess what I was struggling to say earlier. We (briefly) owned a TB racehorse who was by Danehill Dancer, started on the flat as a sprinter, VERY fast, and jumped enormous heights but with no bascule or shape at all. He broke down at the age of 7, and is now spending his remaining happy years at the Racehorse Sanctuary.... But he was very typical of the type of "modern" racehorse that you describe - very light-framed, bred just for speed rather than stayability/durability, and with a far from easy or trainable temperament as a riding horse. All qualities that we would NOT want in a sport horse.

And I guess that that is why the continental studs, whilst still keen to inject that element of TB blood, are finding it increasingly difficult to find the "right" type of TB. Of course the ending of the steeplechase and road and tracks phases in 4* eventing has probably not helped. There is less motivation for breeders to concentrate on the stamina and durability aspects of the modern eventer now; it was noticeable at Badminton this year that some of the horses seemed to be struggling with fatigue towards the end of the XC course .... But that's a topic for a different thread!!
 
I think in no way can it be said that the TB has no place any longer in eventers. In the WBFSH there is loads of TB blood and most of the Unknowns probably carry TB blood or are TB e.g. Ensign. It is so frustrating that there are so many unknowns which I bet come from the UK and Ireland. It schews any proper analysis of eventing breeding.
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Is Weatherbys not accepted by WBFSH?
 
Hi Tom I was just making a general observation about the role of TBs in sporthorse breeding - it wasn't directed at anything you had said. Sorry if it came across that way
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I'll make multiple replies in this posting...

Rusfusbluemoon: Yes, I think there is a divergenge and I see the divergence growing larger in the future. So it will be harder and harder to find useful TBs for sport horse breeding. My point is NOT that TBs will not be used but that their special status has been lost. They will have to be scrutinized as closely as warmblood stallion prospects and concessions will not be made. The studbooks may make concessions (the KWPN rcently approved two TB stallions but they had to employ a very short list of criteria to assess them; if they used the normal criteria they would not have been accepted) but increasingly the breeders will not. Regarding the half-bred Amiro Z, come on -- Zangersheide wants people to buy his semen. Breeders on the continent ar suspicious of hallf-breds. So Z names him champion 4-y-o of their own competition. They place two of his foals in th top 10 in their own foal competition. Let's see the lad (and other young Z stallions) at Zwolle and other stallion competitions where th judges are the clock and how many poles hit the ground. Regarding Able Albert xx, I believe he was put on the KWPN watch list because the progeny were not good enough but he was good enough for the Irish Horse Board. Enough said. He was not the only TB stallion exiled from the Netherlands to Ireland.

htobago: Shagya Arabs and Anglo-Arabs because they are used in showjumping and eventing have been useful in sport and sport horse breeding and will continue to play a role but other types of Arabs, no thanks.
 
firm, no problem. I understand. One of the hazards of writing these articles is that sometimes people don't read (closely) the essays but react to online discussions and attribute positions to me that are not mine. Or they miss the nuance in an position. I wanted to nip that idea in the bud!
 
I agree with respect to Show jumping and Dressage but not in eventing. The TB and indeed ID/TB still reign supreme. The WB influence is very evident in the Young Event Horse classes which are effectively Combined Training /show classes owing to their jumping ability and movement but for the most part they have still to prove themselves at 4* level. It requires stamina, ground coverage and toughness that the TB excels at. I would say to to you an Irishman that the ID/TB cross is the best eventing mixture now and, I believe, in the forseeable future.

You should stick to ID/TB cross for eventing purposes - and stop selling the best overseas!

We have five eventing along with 3/4 bred yearling by Weston Justice ). Of them we have two half breds (ID/TB) - one at Advanced level by Liberated (TB) the other by Rich Rebel, two TBs both good Irish blood including Ballinvella on dam's side and Grand Plaisir (now at Slyguff to improve their stock). The other two are, respectivelly, by Jumbo out of TB 2* mare and by Cruising out of mare by Furisto (our only WB concession.. and his only perceived problem is ground coverage/stamina for the higher levels not ability. So we are champions of Irish breeding but with a large imput from the TB
 
To the Arab influence question, there is more Arab blood "up close" in the Trakehners and many of the other books have gone this way to include some of the attributes - toughness, stamina, dry head, shapely neck - rather than go back to straight Arabs. Much more reliable and half the work's already done.
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Using Arabs would also run into the same issues as TBs - many Arabs bred for the ring now are not really "sport horses" (I can hear the Arab folks queing to get at me . . .) in the way we accept now. They used to be more general riding horses but the world of specialisation means that other horses do those jobs better and Arabs are increasingly bred to fill quite a narrow niche. "All round" Arabs are simply not that common anymore, let alone ones that could fulfil WB performance requirements. SOME might - I rode two colts that were lovely movers and great jumpers - but even those ones tend to be small and not always the most tractable so again, not really worth it to individual breeders.
 
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