EQB Q&A

Jeff Seder formed EQB in 1978, but it was not until a few years ago that everything fell into place for the biometrics company that specializes in heart and gait analysis of Thoroughbreds.

Teamed with former trainer Patrice Miller, Seder has developed a unique method that combines technology and horsemanship to predict performance in Thoroughbreds, specializing in yearling and two-year-old sales and culling decisions.

There are six horses entered in this year’s Breeders’ Cup World Championships that EQB either bought, recommended the purchase of, or consulted on a culling decision: champions Informed Decision and Forever Together; Grade 1 winners A Z Warrior, Jaycito, and Rightly So; and Grade 3 winner Riley Tucker.

I sat down with Seder and Miller when they were in Lexington last week at the Fasig-Tipton Kentucky fall yearling sale and tried to get them to share some of their secrets.

PD: Congratulations on having six horses in this year’s Breeders’ Cup. Where did all of this success come from?
Seder: I came out of left field -- the Olympic sports medicine movement. I realized it could be adapted to horses, and that’s what turned me onto this. I didn’t come through an apprenticeship with great trainers, but Patti Miller did.
So she and I come from a different place. We try to combine the objective and the subjective. The great horsemen can do it their way, but we’ve aspired to match them doing it our way.

PD: When did you guys meet?
Miller: It must have been the late 1970’s or early ‘80s. I thought Jeff was crazy at first. I thought he was gonna get his brains kicked out. He would run up and stick a thermometer in a horse’s ass. He would scare me to death.

PD: Did something just click a few years ago?
Seder: The first 20-some years were really hard. The ability to do what we wanted to do didn’t exist until recently. We made a lot of mistakes. For everything that worked there were ten things we spent time and money on that didn’t work.

We invented the heart stuff back in 1982 in conjunction with Dr. Norm Rantanen. When the first personal computers came out, we put custom software in there and we had to order specially made transducers to do what we wanted on the heart. Now you can buy all that equipment off the shelf, but we had to make it.

We were checking heart rates and using an EKG meter 20 years ago. So we have data on thousands and thousands of hearts. We were the first ones to do that with accuracy, at any temperature. We learned a ton of stuff, and every year we had more and more data in all these areas.

We didn’t have enough data or good enough horsemanship in the beginning. By the nature of what we do, we should get better every year. The more and better data we have, the better we get at it.

Then we started working with more and better trainers and stables, and got data on the better horses. At the sale time, Patti was getting better at what she does.
Three years ago Ahmed Zayat and George Strawbridge came to us, and for the first time we were turned loose at the auctions and allowed to do it our way instead of working through the other guy’s people – their trainer or farm manager-- going down to the 15th horse on our list. We actually got to get bought the horses we wanted. We were finally doing our thing.

We got two champions (Forever Together and Informed Decision] out of the first five we bought for Strawbridge, and Zayat became the leading owner in the U.S. with horses like Zensational and then this year Eskendereya.

PD: I’ve noticed the horses you guys are on at the auctions, they’re not the million-dollar horses, but they’re usually not secrets either. You buy a lot in the $100,000 to $300,000 range. The horses you guys like seem to be a very specific subset of what I would identify as the “good” horses in every auction.

Seder: We believe that you really don’t have to pay more than $250,000 to $300,000 to buy a great horse. That is the sweet spot, because the probability of getting a Grade 1 winner is just as high as on the expensive horses. So even when the million-dollar horses are on our list, we‘re okay letting them go in favor of three or four horses that fit all out criteria for the same total price. I think there’s more good horses out there than people believe, but injury and attitude compromise them.

Some of the great horses in history, they look a lot like the horses we pick today. We’re doing it with something new, but we’re picking a lot of classic horses. I think the commercial market has keyed on a horse that can win as two-year-old and be fast early. I think people forgot what the classic horses were like.

PD: What separates you from your competition?
Seder: I don’t think anybody comes close to what we do with the heart. We do the lung, the spleen. Nobody has a technician like Patti Miller who has done 20 or 30 thousand horses and has been a trainer and a jockey. She goes into these stalls with these yearlings and she can get their heart rates down to 30 or 40 beats per minute.

That is important because in order to do what we do to measure the heart, you need the heart rate low. And that means you need a calm horse. That’s not easy to do in an auction environment in a strange place with a strange person. You can’t get accurate data that way…

What’s most important is what’s wrong, not what’s right. You’re looking for the hole. A horse that is very good at everything is better than a horse that’s excellent at a few things.

The heart data and the fact we consider so many variables – that’s our edge. Another thing we do is we look at every horse in the sale. If there’s 300 horses in a sale, we look at 300. To do that, it takes time, and it’s exhausting. Trainers don’t have that much time, and bloodstock agents don’t have the money frankly to field that kind of an effort.

I financed it in the beginning and I lost enormous amounts of money. Now we can do it and get paid for it.

PD: So, what are you actually measuring on the hearts?
Seder: We’re measuring the size of the left ventricle, how much blood it holds, thickness of walls, and the ejection fraction percentage of the volume the left ventricle can actually pump in one stroke. You don’t want it too big or too little. It’s the same as in a racing engine. If the stroke of the piston pushes out too much of what the cylinder holds, you lose power because it creates turbulence and you lose efficiency in the next stroke.

We also look at the quality of the heart muscle, and the shape and size of the chambers. And there’s other organs that have to go with it.
There’s more than one way to put the notes together to make a symphony, but if you just put the notes together at random, it won’t sound good. In other words, it’s not just a big heart. It’s a heart that fits together with everything else.

PD: What are you using to get the heart data and how do you know what it means?
Seder: We use 2d ultrasound, confirmed through cadaver study at major universities.

PD: What are some of the ways Patti’s horsemanship comes into play?
Seder: Conrad Lorenz wrote a classic text on animal behavior called “On Aggression.” It really is a science, but it’s an art as well. Patti has a pretty good intuition, especially at the farms where you can see them interact with the other horses in the field.
Madcap Escapade, when she came in from the field, the other yearlings parted like the Red Sea. That was important.

Eskendereya was a chunky foal, not a typical looking yearling, but his behavior was that of a prize boxer, a dominant athlete.

Patti observes how horses interact. There are some horses we don’t touch because we think they’ll be crazy. A really good horse does what you want when you want. Patti has the authority to nix a horse if we think it’s whack-a-doodle.

Miller: No one interviews horses and asks them if they want to try out for the track team or the chess team. Some horses are dead competitive from day one, some can learn to race, and a lot of them just say, “Not tonight...”

You’re looking for a horse that is going to go out there and try under adversity. When they get to the quarter pole in the Kentucky Derby, I guarantee you the first flight all has five-release cardios and good gaits. But from that quarter pole home, it’s another kind of heart that carries them…

Sometime you’ll see a stone sprinter body and you look inside and it’s got a route cardio. Those horses don’t work. The same with pedigree. You want it to match.
I really love a smart horse. Good horses, either they’re a little bit temperamental – fillies especially -- or they’re smart. And they don’t pick a fight unless they absolutely have to. When you’re in a sales situation you can’t see that.

But if a horse gets upset by everything little thing while I’m looking at him, I guarantee I won’t like that horse. They have to be tougher than that at the track.
Informed Decision is a lovely, compliant horse. At least she was when I had her as a two-year-old. Forever Together is a bitch. I remember I sat at a stream with her, and I tapped her – she doesn’t like to be hit – but I just had to tap her to get her to go on. She had been allowed to get away with a few things, so I had to outlast her. She got to the point where she would do anything you asked. I’m sure Jonathan Sheppard has faced a lot of challenges training her.

Mr. Zayat is one of our clients who likes input on temperament and the types of races we think a horse will excel at.


PD: Tell me about the culling work you’re being hired to do?
Seder: We’re going to farms and training centers. We set up our slow motion film, and we look at the horses in workouts. We talk to handlers and vets and riders and look at the horses. And all that data goes together to help us recommend who to keep and who are the lower probability horses. And we’re not always right. The low probability events happen.

But just because something unlikely happens, it doesn’t make it likely. You have to play the odds in this business. We’re supposed to produce Grade 1 winners every single year for major clients. We can’t go after the low probability events. We have a saying, “The race is not always to the swift or the strong, but that’ the way to bet.”

PD: Do you prefer to buy at yearling or two-year-old sales?
Seder: The statistics are clear that more really good horses come from yearling sales, but I think that’s deceptive, because many more are sold as yearlings.

We are twice as reliable at two-year-old sales. The reason for that is common sense. At the two-year-old sales, you have an enormous amount of data that is more relevant. At a yearling sale, all we have is the heart, the walk, and standing conformation, so we’re not as good. We‘re pretty good, but we’re not as good.

PD: Our sales-to-racetrack data shows better percentages of runners coming out of the two-year-old sales.
Seder: The two-year-old sales have grown up in the last ten years. They’re a whole different thing. It seems like half the slots in the Derby starting gate are from the two-year-old sales now. The professional pinhookers are buying a lot of nice yearlings and reselling them as two-year-olds. That’s changed the game.


PD: Is there anything you do not like about the two-year-old sales?
Seder: A lot of horses we’d love to buy fail the vet, and the injuries sometimes come as a result of being trained for the two-year-old sales. That is unfortunate.


PD: What conformation flaws can you live with and which are deal breakers?
Miller: It’s interesting what you forgive. It turns out it is combinations of conformation faults that are the kiss of death. You can have one thing and not the other thing, and you’ll be fine…
I would take a horse to New Bolton Center to have a tendon scanned, and I would watch the other horses with bowed tendons come in and go out. And after I watched about 20, I said, “Gee, there’s a couple conformation faults that I keep seeing.” Most of it was behind, and it wasn’t what you’d think to look for behind. But it was so dramatic I noticed it.

A lot of people think bowed tendons are tied to being back at the knee, but most of the bowed tendon horses I saw weren’t back at the knee.
Some were offset, but most horses are. But they all had the same hind-end flaw, and it was dramatic. I’d say in 80% of they bowed tendons, you will see this conformation flaw. It’s a big advantage when you take the data and organize it the way Jeff does.

You have to learn what works and doesn’t work. I save all my conformation comments, and whenever a horse wins a graded stake, I go back and look at my confo comments. I love to go to the Breeders’ Cup and just stand there in the paddock. You’re going to walk into the filly’s turf decision and see a lot of offset, crooked knees, toe-ins, and a lot of horses that aren’t perfect.

In the end, it’s something my father told me once. I’m sure the quote belongs to someone – “It’s better to have a diamond with a flaw then a pebble without.” You have to keep that in the back of your mind when you’re looking at a horse.
Informed Decision had a P1 chip. We bought her with it. She’s raced with it, and she’s never looked back.

PD: What is that fault that you believe leads to bowed tendons?
Miller: I’m not telling you that.

PD: Do you feel like you have a significant edge at the auctions?
Miller: I am so glad most people don’t use hearts or believe in them. At the yearling sales, hearts cut down the short list by 60%.

At the yearling sales, we use the heart data, my eye, and conformation analysis. At the two-year-old sales, it’s the high-speed film gait analysis and heart. Those are the edges.

Gait analysis I weigh heavier than anything. At the two-year-old sales, I don’t even look at the horses that aren’t Jeff’s top picks on gait analysis. There are a lot of pretty horses that can’t run.

PD: Let’s talk about some of the horses you recommended who will be running the Breeders’ Cup. What can you tell me about Jaycito (Breeders’ Cup Juvenile)?
Seder: According to my stuff, the further Jaycito goes, the better he’s gonna look. The way he is put together inside and out, he’s a classic horse.

PD: Mr. Zayat bred A Z Warrior (Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies), put her in Keeneland September, and bought her back for $775,000. Did you tell him not to sell her?
Seder: Zayat is a smart guy and makes up his own mind. We told him this horse moves great and has a beautiful cardio system. We told him this is the kind of horse we recommend you buy. He kept her.

PD: You’ve got two horses in the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint, which one would you bet on?
Seder: I love Informed Decision, but Rightly So is a little younger and on top of her game. It’s not that she’s a better horse, but I think the way she runs and the way Informed Decision runs, it will be tough to catch Rightly So.