More Means Less for Regional Breeders!
Roger Lyons on Nicks: (Part III)
An elemental consideration in the construction of a nick rating system is the question, what will be taken as evidence of good crosses? For two decades regional breeders have been well served by the WTC system, which has based its nick ratings on unrestricted stakes quality.
From time to time, regional breeders have asked whether or not regionally restricted stakes would provide a more comprehensive basis. It’s also been suggested that a breeder who is trying to breed a good allowance horse might take the winners of open allowance races as the model for how to breed one. It’s a slippery slope.
It sounds sensible to think that evidence of effective crosses should be based on the class of horse you’re trying to breed. Consider, however, the many variables besides the sire-line cross that can determine the performance of a given runner. An exceptional individual can result from a mix of the quality of sire and/or dam, a very good physical match, a favorable inbreeding pattern. Then there is the set of conditions under which a given horse prevails in a given race, including his handling, training regimen, race selection, not to mention racing luck. A horse may be bred from a bad sire-line cross, but perform well at its level for a variety of other reasons. You just can’t tell to what extent a horse’s sire-line cross figures in his performance.
What distinguishes runners of high class–and this is extremely important–is that their performance is much more likely to have been determined by a combination of favorable factors, including the sire-line cross. The highest racing class requires a rich variety of many factors working together. For this reason, runners of high class are much more likely to provide reliable evidence of a favorable cross–or any other value. That’s why, regardless of the class of horse you’re trying to breed, you should look to horses of the highest class for your breeding model.
This logic has been turned on its head at the Blood-Horse Publications website dedicated to its nick rating. They confuse the standard of evidence by saying that “patterns of successful breeding turn up in good and bad runners.” It’s not a matter of where a breeding method can “turn up.” In order to see that a bad runner is bred from a good cross, you must already know it’s a good cross. You can’t make that determination on the basis of bad, mediocre, fairly good, or just lucky runners. It has to be based on truly superior runners.
What counts as evidence should be determined by a balance between two opposing requirements of a nick rating system: 1) the selection of winners must be broad enough to encompass the array of sire-lines that might be crossed in the population; 2) the system must take as evidence winners of the highest possible class. In order to make a system useful to everyone, it has to yield numbers large enough to evaluate the range of sire-line crosses that occur. However, the farther down the class scale it goes, the more compromised that evidence will be.
Graded/group stakes provide the most reliable basis for evidence of the quality of sire-line crosses. The problem is that winners of those stakes do not adequately represent the array of sire-line crosses that must be covered by a comprehensive nick rating system. So, the WTC system includes unrestricted stakes. For 20 years that has served to strike a balance between the need for reliable evidence of good crosses and the numbers that are needed.
If restricted stakes are not needed, then, considering how they would affect reliability, what compensating value could they possibly add? Since the Blood-Horse Publications nick rating system is the only one that includes restricted stakes, let’s see what they have to say.
Surprisingly, Blood-Horse Publications has little to say about it, other than that competing products “are not able to accurately identify and report specific regionally-successful nicks.” I suspect that the designers of the Blood-Horse Publications system have not reflected on the impact a large volume of restricted stakes would have on the reliability of those so-called “regionally-successful nicks.”
I suspect, too, that they haven’t thought through the idea of “regionally-successful nicks” beyond its potential as a selling point. Had they done so, they would surely have discovered the disastrous consequences that idea has for a comprehensive sire-line nick rating system. More about that in my next post.