Ten years ago when I first began writing about equine sports medicine, I madealot of predictions which virtually everyone thought were quite foolhearty. [ felt exercise testing on the fast treadmill would allow sophisticated accurate prediction of performance ability. I believed that poor performance could be analyzed, diagnosed, and quantified on the treadmill. I envisioned a time when the average equine race track hospital would own and use a high speed treadmill for evaluation of race horses on a routine basis. I am not claiming I was a profit, or that I had clearer vision than anyone else. Most of the ideas that I wrote about were inspired by people such as Warwick Bayly, Dean Essex, Rueben Rose, and even Tom Ivers. Like all writers, I wrote about what inspired me. So, I was excited when a large Thoroughbred farm in Solvang, CA, put in a high speed treadmill and began testing their yearlings to predict performance ability and monitor improvement in fitness. It was a great dissappointment to me, and more so to the dedicated inovators who were using the new techniques at the farm, when the owners of the farm gave up on the project and sold out. Shortly thereafter, Howard Seeherman and his group at Tufts University developed a performance profiling program for horses on their high speed treadmill. They laid some very important groundwork which they, and others, have since improved upon. Other veterinary colleges are following Tufts' lead in performance profiling techniques,
