How Wearable Tech Is Protecting Both Athletes on the Racetrack

Horse racing has always been as dangerous as it is spectacular. In 2025, Churchill Downs recorded 11 equine deaths from race-related injuries — a sharp rise from the previous year's six. Santa Anita Park, as its controversial season drew to a close, logged its 30th fatality since late the prior year. When a champion racehorse can be worth millions of dollars and a jockey must control an animal nearly ten times their own weight at speeds exceeding 40 miles per hour, the sport's inherent risk feels almost hardwired into its DNA.

What deserves closer attention is a fact that's often overlooked: the core athletic performance in horse racing is actually a collaboration between two very different athletes — the horse and the jockey. Their health and safety are deeply intertwined. A new generation of wearable devices designed for horses is now changing the way trainers, veterinarians, and jockeys anticipate and prevent injury.

How Horses Train — and How They're "Read"

The training logic for racehorses closely mirrors that of distance runners. Every morning, each horse follows an individualized plan set by the trainer — ranging from full gallops to slow jogs, with easy days sometimes consisting of nothing more than a gentle walk. Each horse has preferred surfaces and distances: some perform better on turf, others thrive on dirt. The trainer's job, refined through daily morning workouts, is to understand where a particular horse fits best and to keep adjusting that picture.

Morning workouts also serve another critical function: identifying potential injuries. Unlike human athletes, a horse cannot say "my ankle hurts," and subtle changes in gait are often impossible to detect with the naked eye.

This is exactly where wearable technology steps in. Sensors from companies like Garmin and StrideSafe capture a horse's "running fingerprint" — its normal gait characteristics when healthy. The moment that gait shifts, even imperceptibly, the system flags the team to investigate further and determine whether it signals a minor injury. The more consistently the device is worn, the more refined that fingerprint becomes, and the better the system gets at detecting anomalies.

There's clear medical reasoning behind this: catastrophic fractures typically develop from long-accumulating micro-fractures. Catching problems earlier — before that fatal tipping point — not only means saving lives, but also gives horses a better chance at recovery and a longer career on the track.

Micro-fractures are among the most common hidden dangers in sudden racehorse fatalities. Under repeated high-intensity impact, a horse's bones accumulate fatigue damage. These hairline cracks are often undetectable on X-rays or ultrasound, yet can suddenly propagate into catastrophic fractures during a full-speed sprint. The radius, cannon bone, and pastern are the most frequently affected sites; once fractured, a horse can barely stand on the track, making treatment extremely difficult. This is why gait monitoring matters not just for detecting obvious lameness, but for capturing the subtle compensatory gait changes that micro-fractures trigger early on — a horse will unconsciously reduce weight-bearing on the affected limb, a shift that shows up in the data days or even weeks before it becomes visible to the human eye.

The Other Athlete Who Gets Overlooked: The Jockey

Jockeys may look like passengers, but they are in fact highly specialized athletes. During a race, a jockey's heart rate surges to 170–190 beats per minute — roughly 95% of maximum heart rate. Some professionals describe race riding as high-intensity interval training (HIIT): jockeys are in the saddle for only about two minutes at a time, but the intensity climbs relentlessly throughout those two minutes.

Another cornerstone of jockey fitness is that iconic crouching posture, known in the industry as the "martini glass position." In this stance, the jockey keeps their back relatively flat to minimize aerodynamic drag.

After this position became widely adopted, race times improved by approximately 5–7% — a remarkable gain from a single postural adjustment. The mechanics work by lifting the jockey's center of gravity off the horse's back, allowing the jockey to move more fluidly in sync with the horse. Maintaining this position demands exceptional leg and core strength: jockeys balance on just their big toe — sometimes adding the second and third toes — in the stirrup, a deliberate safety measure to prevent the entire foot from slipping through and getting dragged. There are no breaks during a race. Lactic acid builds continuously. The jockey holds a deep squat position throughout and may even cramp mid-race. Whether an athlete can hold on when their body is nearing its absolute limit is precisely what separates a good jockey from a great one.

The "martini glass position" takes its name from the inverted triangle of a martini glass — the jockey's torso and legs form the body of the glass, with the feet in the stirrups at the base. This riding revolution was pioneered in the late 19th century by American jockey Tod Sloan, who introduced it on British tracks and upended the tradition of jockeys riding upright. Modern sports science confirms that the forward crouch shifts the jockey's center of gravity upward and forward, reducing vertical pressure on the horse's back and allowing the horse's back muscles to extend and generate power more freely. The jockey's body simultaneously becomes a kind of shock absorber that moves with the horse rather than working against it. This also explains why core stability is so critical for jockeys — the moment the torso goes loose, the jockey starts "bouncing" in the saddle, disrupting the horse's stride frequency.

Stronger, But Not Heavier

Jockeys face a particular paradox: they must get stronger without gaining significant weight. They typically need to maintain a body weight of around 112 to 118 pounds, since every race requires a weigh-in beforehand.

To make weight, jockeys often deliberately dehydrate before races. But this is nothing like the weight-cutting done by boxers or wrestlers — a fighter who cuts weight can rehydrate with electrolytes and fluids after the weigh-in, sometimes gaining five pounds back before stepping into the ring. A jockey who drops from 118 to 115 pounds often can't drink anything, because they may still have several more horses to ride that day.

This kind of dehydration is dangerous for both the jockey and the horse. It slows reaction time and accelerates mental fatigue. On the track, other horses and jockeys surround them on all sides, and horses are living creatures that react unpredictably to external stimuli. If one horse falls or collides ahead of the pack, the chain reaction can ripple all the way back to the last horse in the field.

This is exactly why cardiovascular and strength training are so critical. The more fatigued a jockey becomes, the harder it is to maintain a stable, coordinated crouch. Once they fall out of sync with the horse's rhythm, the horse can get injured — and the jockey can get thrown.

The "weight assignment" system is a core fairness mechanism in horse racing. A race committee assigns a minimum weight requirement for each horse based on factors like age, sex, and race history; the jockey's body weight combined with the saddle and equipment must meet this number. When a jockey's natural weight falls below the requirement, lead weights are added beneath the saddle; when they're overweight, they lose the ride. The system was designed to give horses of varying ability a more level competitive starting point — but in practice it has pushed jockeys into a cycle of chronic weight management. The International Jockeys' Championship Association (IJCA) has been advocating for higher minimum weight standards in recent years, partly to improve jockey health and reduce the safety risks associated with extreme dehydration and crash dieting.

The Safety of Two Athletes Is Really One Issue

Optimizing for the health of both the horse and the jockey ultimately points toward the same goal: reducing the most lethal events in racing — falls. Most jockey injuries stem from falls, with riders protected by nothing more than a helmet and a foam-padded vest as they travel at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour.

The logic is straightforward: a horse in good condition with a stable gait is far less likely to stumble on the track. Keeping horses healthy and preventing injury also indirectly protects the person riding them. With modern data collection and sports medicine, teams can develop a much deeper understanding of both the horse's and the jockey's physical state — and manage them as a single integrated system.

Horse racing will always be a dangerous sport, and questioning whether its risks are worth it is entirely reasonable. But trainers, veterinarians, and jockeys are working together to make it as safe as it can be. As one veterinarian in the field put it: regardless of how a horse performs, everyone's ultimate shared wish is the same — to bring it home safely, ready to race another day.