Evaluating versatile horses

[Kelly Haggerty]

For those that breed/race multi-surface types, do you:

1) Look for the fastest workout overall to determine the horse's best or
2) Look for the fastest relative to other workouts on that same surface?

Thanks

[Laura Smith]

I look at them relative to other works over the same distance/surface, absolutely.

For example, AWS top works (at 3f) are consistently about 1 second, or a bit more, behind TS top works. So if I have a hopeful TS/AWS that's working 35.6 on turf and 37.0 on AW, I can be pretty confident that it'll be a better turf horse, but still clearly has at least a bit of AW ability.

[Kelly Haggerty]

I look at them relative to other works over the same distance/surface, absolutely.

For example, AWS top works (at 3f) are consistently about 1 second, or a bit more, behind TS top works. So if I have a hopeful TS/AWS that's working 35.6 on turf and 37.0 on AW, I can be pretty confident that it'll be a better turf horse, but still clearly has at least a bit of AW ability.

Thank you!

[J.P Dogood]

What Laura said is pretty much your best bet. My anecdotal evidence is that for some reason all my versatile horses seemed to do better on synthetic. This may just be the overall weakness of synthetic to the other two surfaces though.