Leading racing and sportsbook data supplier Pythia Sports has unveiled its AI-powered solution which is designed to help buyers identify standout breeze-up prospects during the sales season.

The month of April welcomes the annual series of ‘breeze-up sales’ – at which two year-old horses are put through their paces and then sold at auction.

And now, there’s a new technology designed to make the process of solving the sales more efficient. 

Pythia Sports’s tech provides buyers with a deeper analysis of the horse’s breezing, combining artificial intelligence, machine learning and historical breeze-up sales data to improve the accuracy of performance predictions.

Incorporating more than 100 essential factors, the innovative tech is a proprietary model which evaluates time, stride and biomechanics for every horse at the breeze-ups. These considerations then generate a comprehensive rating for each horse. 

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Technology already making an impact

Pythia introduced the technology to the breeze-up sale at Newmarket last week, where it gathered a lot of interest from the breeze-up fraternity, says Pythia head of commercial operations, Stephen Davison, and will continue its analysis in Doncaster next week.

“The technology analyses three different sections of the breeze: the time, speed and stride profile, the model tracks each stride as the horse gallops combining it with sectional times,” says Davison. “That allows us to see how the stride profile changes as the horse accelerates and when it reaches top speed.

“We have biomechanics as well, that looks at the horse’s walk and takes measurements of a horse’s conformation and its gait. That works in conjunction with historic racing performances to learn what the most defining physical features are in an elite horse. 

“For example we can go back ten years to look up breeze-up data to say, ‘this horse did this breeze, this stride and these biomechanics’ and then the machine learning model can start picking up stuff we’ve missed or things we’ve maybe underestimated or overestimated.”

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“I think there’s definitely starting to be a lot more openness to people using data to inform their decision making. You only have to look at where football was 10-15 years ago to where it is today. The obvious examples are Brighton and Brentford who were using their own player data models to find value in the transfer market way before any other top level club.  It is only natural that you can get a cross over into other sports and other industries. We’re hoping we can play our part in revolutionising the way horse racing and bloodstock views the use of data within the sport. “  

The Doncaster sale takes place April 23-24, with the breeze from 8.30am on the 23rd and the sale beginning at 10am sharp on the 24th.