By Adam Spradling, Web Producer, Digital Designer and Blogger at The Blood-Horse.
BloodHorse.com offers a deep pool of tools to use if you are trying to research a current race horse. Especially if the horse is in graded stakes competition.
Here is a brief guide to tools on BloodHorse.com that could aide in anything from a school paper to discovering your next claim.
Search: Our search tool is improved, if you type the race name or horse name you are looking for, then articles with those specific words will appear. You can add quotations around words you specifically want to enhance the search even more.
For example type "Rachel" "Alexandra" for those two words to be keyed and bring up articles or media that contains those two specific words mentioned. If you are looking for a specific statement and not individual words, try "Rachel Alexandra" as a phrase in quotations.
Horse Profiles: Horse profiles are neat and robust. By finding an individual horse profile you can see any stories or media related to the desired horse. Included in the profile are the horse's pedigree, auctions history, biography, photos (that you can often order) and in some cases custom tabs.
Once a week we try to highlight an athelete's profile through our newsletters or homepage, so keep an eye out for those. The exclusive weekly pedigree analysis we have on BloodHorse.com tend to also highlight a current race horse and will involve their profile, history and pedigree.
To see a listing of our Pedigree Analyses visit here.
Horse Profile Examples:
Twirling Candy has a bio and pedigree, as well as photos from past races and news articles and multimedia associated with Twirling candy, which appear beneath the bio/pedigree tab. "Related Articles" would be the heading to look for.
Zenyatta and Uncle Mo horse profiles have custom tabs with video race replays.
You can also search alphabetically on the Horse Profiles search page. If the horse has been racing in the past few years there is a good chance that horse has a profile.
Race Profiles: As a companion to our horse profiles, we have race profiles. One set is for entries, the other for results of a race. You can see the order of finish, race details, and the horse names are linked if they have a Horse Profile or are on StallionRegister.com. Often you can find the race replays and payoffs included as a tab on race profile pages.
Race Entries
Race Results
Race Profile Result: La Brea
Racing Leaders: Want to learn who the leading earners are for the year? Here is a link to our tabbed lists of Racing Leaders.
Of course you can always visit our racing page to find a top 10 list of top horse profiles being viewed by our users. Many other tools exist on the racing page for researching race horses.
Our Breeding / Sire Lists and Auctions Lists / Sales topic pages also hold tools for learning of auctions and breeding trends.
Then there is the old reliable database for new and old sires on StallionRegister.com for example Eskendereya. Remember there are no mares in the Stallion Register, such as Zenyatta or Ginger Punch.
