Olympic gold medalist Bode Miller has a new base for his horse racing aspirations, and he will try to bring some of the modern training techniques that helped him to the top of his sport over to the Sport of Kings.
Miller, who won gold in the men’s super combined event in alpine skiing at the 2010 Winter Games, said Tuesday that he has finalized the purchase of a barn at Fair Hill training center near Elkton, Md. The barn, Perfect Sky 1, had previously been owned by Earle Mack. From this base of operations, Miller hopes to bring a new approach to training Thoroughbreds.
“It’s basically implementing sport science and the lessons we’ve learned in training for human sports over the last 50 or 60 years,” Miller said.
Miller envisions himself and partners owning about 15 horses in a training program that he will oversee, plus about 15 horses from other owners interested in participating. Miller’s program will incorporate both traditional methods as well as modern technology: Traditional horsemen will carry out daily exercise programs, and Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen will use a sport science approach to monitor the horses.
Miller said one day he probably will pursue a training license, but under the scenario he envisions, it’s not entirely needed. He currently has eight horses with Fair Hill-based trainer Tres Abbott. Abbott said the approach can work because Miller excels at communicating with everyone involved in an operation.
“He’s really taking a good approach with it. He wants to take advantage of a lot of the technology that is available and has been used in human sports,” said Abbott, who has worked in Europe for trainers Aidan O’Brien and Sir Michael Stoute. “We have good communication channels. He’s very easy to talk to, so we’ve talked about different ideas, what I’m doing and why.
“I worked in England and Ireland, so I try to work in a lot of hill training and interval training. We talk about how his horses have been going along and which ones might benefit from hill work or speed work. If I tell him a horse might not be able to mentally handle it or physically handle it, we’ll talk about it.”
Miller said he has worked for 15 years with Stray-Gundersen, who has worked with numerous Olympic athletes through his Maximal Human Performance approach. Miller said both sides of the operation — the traditional training and sport science — will work together.
“They have to communicate,” Miller said. “The horsemanship side has to take precedence over the science side, but both sides have to respect one another.”
Miller said the Fair Hill barn has 40 stalls, but beginning this fall he is planning an overhaul that will reduce the stalls to about 30. He envisions Thoroughbreds staying active for “at least four or five hours a day.” Much of this exercise will be on treadmills in a controlled environment. Miller believes that by building up a horse’s aerobic fitness, they’ll be able to perform more anaerobic work.
Technology will be used to monitor the horses, determine how their fitness is progressing, and pick up on any developing injuries. Because his program is intensive and will require hands-on oversight from a team of people, Miller does not want too many horses involved.
“On the training side of things, in terms of monitoring and getting the sport-specific responses that you want from a given animal based on the task you’re pointing them to, the horse racing industry is stuck about where human sports were in the 1950s or so,” Miller said.
Miller said some of these approaches were tried in the 1980s and 1990s, but after some horses were injured, trainers gave up on them and reverted to the standard training methods. Miller said athlete monitoring has improved immensely since then, and through such monitoring, training regimens specific to each horse can be developed while each Thoroughbred also is closely observed to catch any developing injuries.
“The real point is, we’re going to try to maximize the potential of every single horse, get the optimal level of performance out of every horse,” Miller said. “If you look at what is going on now, the training is all pretty standardized. Every horse is subjected to the same routine, and the better horses kind of come out on top. The problem is that any system that’s based on fitting every single horse into it ends up undershooting a large percentage of horses and overshooting a large percentage of horses.”
Miller hopes to find owners that are committed to the approach.
“We don’t necessarily need expensive horses, but we need quality horses,” said Miller, adding that they have an assessment program in place. “I’d love to be in contact with owners, and I will give them an absolutely fair assessment of their horses. I’m not looking for day-rate horses. I want exceptional athletes to work with. … We have a system of assessing the horses that can give some really good baseline information.”
Miller has developed a friendship with Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert, who named a son after Miller, and he traces his love of horses back to his grandparents in New Hampshire. It takes confidence to zip down a mountain on skis, sometimes reaching speeds of 80 or 90 mph, and Miller plans to bring that same level of confidence to horse racing.
“What we do with horses right now is truly ridiculous,” he said. “We expect horses to race a mile, mile-and-a-quarter, a mile-and-a-half, but we never train them anywhere near those distances or anywhere near the speed they would go at during those races. If you wanted to try to create a situation designed to hurt that animal, you almost couldn’t design a better system than what we do right now with horses.
“We sit them in the stall 23 1/2 hours, let them run once a day at about a two-thirds pace, then work them once every seven to 10 days. That’s too long between works for a residual effect. It’s well outside the window to where you’d have a cumulative training effect, which is more like three or four days. So you totally miss the cumulative training effect. Instead, working every seven to 10 days creates a cumulative negative effect on the structure: bones, ligaments, tendons. Over time you get cumulative stress fractures, calcium deposits, those types of things.”
Just as he was driven to reach the top in skiing, Miller has the same goals in horse racing. He has not ruled out a return to competitive skiing but said he will take at least a year off from the sport. He said he was happy to see Baffert win the Triple Crown with American Pharoah but that the competitive part of him wished he’d attained that prize first.
“I was really happy to see Bob win the Triple Crown this year. That’s been my goal for the past five or six years,” Miller said. “Bob is a close friend of mine, and I couldn’t have been happier for him and [his wife] Jill and the whole team really, but at the same time I was frustrated because I think we’re heading in that same direction. We want to reproduce that.”
