One of the disconcerting features of Sprinter Sacre’s comeback effort at Ascot on Saturday was that he was found, on later examination at the course, to have bled from the nose. Punters and fans of the great chaser may now be fretting over the possibility that the problem could recur, possibly undermining his ability in future starts, but the expert advice suggests such concerns would be unjustified.
“Probably all racehorses bleed into their lungs to some extent at some point, if they stay in training for long enough,” says Dr Colin Roberts, an expert in equine internal medicine now working at Cambridge University. “But it probably doesn’t have a significant effect on performance.
“We don’t know exactly what level of bleed is necessary to interfere with performance. Generally speaking, I think that, if the horse has a visible nosebleed during a race or immediately afterwards, then that will have affected its performance. If you have to look for the bleed with an endoscope, then probably not.
“If the bleed is visible in the race or immediately on pulling up after the race, those horses generally have the more severe grades of bleeding. They’ve not usually lost huge amounts of blood but you can see quite a lot of evidence of blood in the lungs.
“If you find a bleed later than that, it’s not such a good indicator. It’s purely gravity, they put their head down and what blood is in the trachea can trickle out of the nose.”
Roberts did not wish to comment specifically on the case of Sprinter Sacre, but the two-mile chaser did not have a visible bleed immediately after his race at the weekend. It was only discovered around half an hour later, after he had been sent for routine testing by the racecourse vets. He was scoped and found to have suffered a “low-grade” bleed that would probably not have affected his performance, in the view of the attending vets.
Roberts cites one survey of Flat racehorses which sought to establish whether the likelihood of bleeding varied with age. It was found that 40% of two-year-old runners had some blood in their airways after running, while the figure was 65% for three-year-olds and 82% for horses aged four or older.
No such survey has been made of jumps racehorses, Roberts reports, but it is his expectation that, since nearly all jumpers are four or older, it would be reasonable to imagine that they bleed about as often as those older Flat horses. This means that the impact on performance is a critical question. Do we think the first horses home in each jumps race are the 20% to 30% who happen not to have bled that day?
That’s not how Roberts sees it but he concedes a shortage of research on the issue, certainly in Britain. “If you look at the surveys that have been done around the world, quite a number found no association between bleeding, as established by endoscopy, and finishing position. Interestingly, one or two found that horses who bled were more likely to have been placed than the others.”
He believes that horses who show a visible bleed immediately on pulling up have probably been affected in their performance to some extent. “But we don’t know why,” he adds, ruling out any possibility that the horses have the sensation of “drowning in their own blood” as is sometimes suggested. “There’s not enough blood for that to be occurring. It doesn’t happen in the vast majority of cases.
“And it’s not because they’re losing lots of blood. If I was a trainer of a horse who had run disappointingly, I’d want to rule a lot of other things out before I accepted that it had run poorly because of exercise-induced pulmonary haemorrhage,” Roberts says, using the scientific label for bleeding from the lungs.
He says there is no evidence that such bleeding hurts a horse and adds that most would be unaware of it having happened. On that basis, he does not see anything cruel or unfair in asking a horse to race, despite the possibility of a bleed.
A similar view is taken by Jenny Hall, chief veterinary officer of the British Horseracing Authority, who reports that EIPH has been observed in humans as well as in greyhounds and camels. “It’s been reported across the spectrum of horse activity but it’s more common with more intense exercising and it’s now considered an inevitable consequence of moderate to intense exercise in horses and other animals,” she says.
“It’s very widespread and it does probably increase with age. The bit that is unpredictable is which horses will show a bit of blood at their nostril. That doesn’t necessarily reflect the severity of the bleed, it’s a really inconsistent variable.
“If, every time you exercise, you suffer really severe EIPH, that will have an effect on performance. But the type of bleeding in Sprinter Sacre’s case is the type that, if we looked for it, if we scoped everything that ran, we’d find in a lot of horses. It’s very hard to match that to performance. That low-level type stuff, it’s hard to believe that’s going to have a huge impact.”
Both Roberts and Hall feel that the risk of bleeding can be reduced by focusing on a young horse’s respiratory health and by ensuring good air quality in his stable environment.
Even a history of serious bleeding is no bar to later success, as Kim Bailey proved with Master Oats, who bled immediately after winning at Uttoxeter early in his chasing career. “He filled a bucket in the unsaddling enclosure and the vet that day thought he might die,” Bailey recalled during racing at Exeter this week. “It was as bad a bleed as I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The trainer responded by changing the horse’s exercise regime, in the hope of saving his horse from a similar experience at home. “We had him out twice a day, we never put him under stress, we never worked him, we only hack cantered. He’d go out in the morning and he’d go out in the afternoon. It was an odd way of doing it. We’ve done it a couple of times since. Does it always work? Probably not.”
Some 16 months later, Master Oats won the Cheltenham Gold Cup by 15 lengths, having picked up the Welsh National and several other prizes along the way. Did the bleeding ever recur? “No, never did,” Bailey said. “But we never scoped him again to find out! Why look for trouble? If we scoped him and found blood, the bottle of whisky would come out.
“If we all knew what actually causes [burst] blood vessels, life would be very easy. No one’s found a cure. There will be plenty of people saying, oh, we can cure the bloody things from doing it but I’m afraid to say there is no cure.
“If you scope 90% of the horses running today, you’ll find something, especially on this [soft] ground.”
