High-tech, targeted horse training offers winning solution

A member of Zeng's team monitors horse racing with a high-speed camera. HU HUHU FOR CHINA DAILY

Every weekend, Zeng Yaqi, a scientist at Xinjiang Agricultural University, waits at a racecourse to attach heart rate monitors to horses.

"In the horse racing industry, trainers have their own 'tricks' to pick and train horses that they never share with others," Zeng said. With advanced technology and equipment, his team is set to crack those secrets.

He relies on a motion trajectory analysis system, which consists of a high-speed cam-era and motion trajectory analysis software.

Before each race, the 1,000-frames-per-second cam-era is installed next to race-tracks to collect lateral pictures of the running horses.

"With the help of the soft-ware, the movements of each joint of a horse are automatically drawn frame by frame to calculate its stride length, frequency and time, as well as its gait characteristics, such as the stance phase and the swing phase," Zeng said.

Meanwhile, the heart rate monitor can record the horses' heart rate during and after the race and its recovery time to evaluate its aerobic capacity and cardiopulmonary function.

Horse trainers can arrange targeted training based on the collected data and adjust training intensity according to heart rate records, he said.

"A scientific training strategy can be a shortcut to improving the performance, and value, of racehorses," he said.

China has a long history of horse husbandry and racing, especially among ethnic groups such as Kazakhs, Mongolians and Tibetans. The country's breeding stock of horses ranks third in the world.

As the horse industry has developed, the goals of horse breeding have moved from working the fields to competitive sports, boosting the market for sport horses. Some Chinese regions have begun to hold regular horse racing events in recent years.

Five years ago, Zhaosu county in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, where Zeng usually works, was just grassland. Now it has world-class racetracks, stands that can hold thousands of spectators, and timers with precision down to the millisecond. Zhaosu is part of a nationwide trend.

"For many Chinese jockeys, introducing foreign racehorses and crossbreeding are still the main way to improve a horse's performance in a race," Zeng said. "Most of the time they underestimate the importance of training."

Without proper training, the potential of a well-bred horse is buried, according to Bapa, a retired champion jockey in Xinjiang.

"Herdsmen have inherited or developed their own training methods such as stretching a horse's neck or wrapping it with a quilt, which I don't agree with," Bapa said, adding that high-tech methods are increasingly replacing traditional ones among horse trainers.

"Our team has found that the Chinese market is in urgent need of scientific horse training methods and related products, which we are working on," Zeng said.

XINHUA