Cover image courtesy of Tattersalls
Written by Byron Rogers
Maybe Peter V’landys is right – The Pattern is broken.
Breeders in Australia might want to take this current spat between the principal race clubs and its lack of representation on decisions being made (or not) by The Pattern Committee, to ask a simple question.
Does The Pattern actually serve its purpose for breeders? Does it actually act as a framework for measuring the trait(s) that Australian breeders value, are trying to select for and improve?
The easy answer is “of course it does!”, but that’s a position of comfort (hold on to your blankie and keep sucking your thumbs), not one that withstands intellectual vigor.
My old boss John Messara made an impassioned defense of The Pattern late last year but in doing so he neglected to outline the key limitations of The Pattern at the time of its creation.
The Pattern was created, in the early 1970s. They did the best with what they had in front of them at the time, but for those that have been around long enough you would know that the processing power of the Altai 8800 – the top-end personal computer kit of 1975 had a on board memory of just 64KB (roughly the size of a jpeg image now), the internet itself wasn’t invented until 1983 (TCP/IP) and the world wide web didn’t exist until 1991. The mathematical and computing ability to rank multi-competitor events and compute heritable traits at large scale wasn’t really of age until the early 2000s.
Today, with the data, mathematics and computing power available, producing a rating or metric to measure a trait of every racehorse and every broodmare in Australia and New Zealand can be completed in hours.
It is hard to think of an industry which had a framework built in the 1970s – before high-end computing power and before the mathematics to rate multi-competitor events was available – still using that same framework today as a method of breed improvement….and with no evidence that it actually improves the breed!
It’s the last part of that statement above that needs closer attention.
For forty years breeders have been using The Pattern as a selection methodology, but not once have they stopped to ask, is The Pattern a framework that is properly measuring the trait(s) that we are trying to improve? Is it helping us as breeders, or is it hurting us?
Again, it is easy to say “of course it is helping us”, but would it surprise you to know that not once has the heritability of The Pattern system been tested?
In forty years, not once has the system that was foisted upon breeders in the 1970s, and one that we now tie our commercial outcomes to, been tested to answer a simple question – does the ranked system of The Pattern give us a heritable methodology of selection, or is it so low in heritability that it is actually working against us improving the traits we value?
In theory the ranking of Group 1, Group 2, Group 3 and Listed should mean that as we place greater value on the Group 1 horses over Group 2, etc., that both the ‘trait’ (simply, high-class horses) would improve but also the framework itself would measure the heritability of this trait in a ranked fashion as well - Group 1 horses would more readily produce Group horses, etc. In practice we anecdotally know that it seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy but through the racing and subsequent stud careers of non Group 1 winners in Written Tycoon, I Am Invincible and Not A Single Doubt, cracks appear to show that The Pattern may not be measuring the trait(s) we desire well at all.
In fact, we might well be selecting against stallions (and mares) who actually have displayed the trait that we are trying to reproduce, but because they failed to win under The Pattern system, or at the level The Pattern describes as the best, we discard their genetics altogether and not give them a chance to reproduce at all.
"Through the racing and subsequent stud careers of non Group 1 winners in Written Tycoon, I Am Invincible and Not A Single Doubt, cracks appear to show that The Pattern may not be measuring the trait(s) we desire well at all." - Byron Rogers
Somewhat ironically, sitting in his office today is Dr Brandon Velie, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney and one of the pre-eminent scholars on heritable traits in Thoroughbreds (he, along with Claire Wade and Natasha Hamilton literally wrote the paper 'Heritability of racing performance in the Australian Thoroughbred racing population'.
Dr Velie could easily not only answer that question of if The Pattern is providing the industry with heritable framework of selection, but also provide to the industry better metrics that have higher heritability of the traits that we are trying to improve on as breeders.
If breeders in Australia are truly feeling disenfranchised by The Pattern, a system with no proven heritability and anecdotal evidence that it is not doing what it is supposed to be doing, maybe it's time that breeders took a step back, ditched the aged Pattern system and developed a measure of the traits that they are selecting for and trying to improve (there are multiple traits not just one) and use that instead.
At a minimum it seems intellectually backward to be maintaining a slavish adherence to a methodology of breed improvement, when it hasn’t undergone any scrutiny of its heritability.
The data and computing power is there, the mathematics is there, and Australia has one of the few people in the world most qualified to understand and create heritable measurements. It seems to me that the discord within the racing industry might well give Australian breeders the opportunity to ask themselves if The Pattern has outlived its usefulness and if we can bring ourselves into the 2000s with a more heritable framework for selection… oh, and if one of the traits you measure and select for is career soundness and longevity, Mick Kent might get off your back too!
Regards,
Byron Rogers
Performance Genetics LLC
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the the publishers of Thoroughbred Daily News AusNZ.
This letter was written in response to an article in TDN AusNZ's Wednesday edition, The ongoing challenge of The Pattern.
