Do you know?

[Mark Mclaughlin]

Year 65 will be my 8th sim year. In the last 2 years I've been doing gallop checks on my older horses when I do my newbies.
Although I'm sure these horses do degrade I've never seen that represented in their gallop comment. In particular I'm looking
for drops from allowance to productive. I play small so my sample size is only about 40 horses in those 2 years. Am I wasting my time?
I've never seen a gallop change on an older horse. TYIA.

[J.P Dogood]

I think I’ve seen it once but I rarely gallop check older horses. Once in a blue moon I’ll check a 4 year old if they still haven’t bloomed but I mostly stop after 3.

IMO it’s easy to tell if an older horse degraded by simply running them. If they aren’t running at the same level they were before then they went down. Even if the comment itself doesn’t reflect it.

If you’re having fun you aren’t wasting your time. It’ll just be slower to contend at a higher level if you’re trying to run horses you’re breeding. I’ve been playing for a handful of sim years now and my breeding barn typically is around 50 mares and just now I’m getting my own bred horses retiring and being blue hens

[Mark Mclaughlin]

TY, J.P. It's hard to tell by running them as figs in this sim are so trip dependent IMO. A horse may post 82,64,72,80,56 for example in five consecutive similar races. I was hoping gallops would help. I'm having fun but doing gallops is not when they don't seem to reveal anything. Seems a wasted system except for youngsters. At least I only have about 30 runners per year, most of them claimed.

[Stormy Peak]

I have a mare named Roughian...
https://www.simhorseracing.com/horse.ph ... ID=1061244

She was a yearling stakes.
At age 2 she became a freak, and from there went on to win more money than any female of any breed in the Sim. $9,425,500.
Back then we didn't get a progressive or late bloomer comment.

However when she was 4, I did gallop her and got a Freak Peak comment. I decided to keep racing her, hoping I could have the first mare in the game to ever win $10 Million.

At age 5... she went down from a Freak Peak to a Stakes Peak.
At Age 6... she went down from a Stakes Peak to an Allowance Peak....
(but still managed to finish 2nd in the Pegasus...lol)

So, yeah, gallops can show older horses going into decline.

But I've rarely galloped the older horses, and the reason I rarely gallop check them, is that they are racing, so they keep fit, and since they have a race history, I can tell if they are doing better or worse. So, say, a newly turned 4 year old that was a progressive or late bloomer starts doing much better, then I might gallop just to confirm if he jumped up. Horses that already peaked...I don't worry too much about galloping to find that out if they downgraded, as it usually shows in their race performance.

Stormy

[Mark Mclaughlin]

TY, Stormy. Good to know that.

[Nena Olson]

This mare, Love Tremor was an allowance as a yearling, stakes as a 2yo W9, and is now a freak at age 5.

[Michael Looker]

Gift of the Gab went from Freak Y63 to Allowance Y64, when he turned 7. So he won back-to-back Gr. 1s to end his 6yo year, then ran a long and lonely last in his only run at 7. The SFs in those races were 93, 94, 71.

I mass gallop "bad" horses (weak allowance gallopers and lower) repeatedly until they turn 5, at which point I GP them if I don't think they're good enough to race. A very small number see their gallop comment change downward between ages 4 & 5. By "very small" I mean I got rid of ~86 5yos yesterday and I didn't notice that any of them had gone backwards. But I've seen it in previous years.

[Mark Mclaughlin]

Thanks for arming me with this info folks. I think I'll continue with the gallops, it doesn't take that long.