FEATURE
With syndication the number one form of horse ownership in Australia, single-source communication platforms have become as common as horse poo in stables around the nation, enabling trainers to keep multiple owners up to date with their horse’s progress day to day with the touch of a button. Prism is the chosen platform for Malua Racing, but Larkin explains the application offers much more than an easy way to share track work videos. “Obviously, the communication aspect is great, but Prism is such a time saver in our stable,” he said. “Internally, we share daily worksheets, veterinary treatments and procedures, horse health and condition, rostering; these were all paper-based not long ago. Staff can access the app and can log observations and get their lists for the day. The time it saves is crazy.” Importantly, platforms like Prism store a wealth of information on each horse that can be recalled at any time through the app; everything a horse has ever done in its racing life, from form to trackwork to medications, is kept on file and dialled up in seconds. “That’s a huge factor. You might have a horse come back from a spell after a good racing campaign. Think of big stables with hundreds on the books. You can pull up everything it did last time around and replicate what worked best because you already know what works for the horse. “There’s no guesswork. It’s exact. You start from those facts, use what has worked before, and always trust your eye and the animal.” But as useful as modern training tools are, Larkin knows that sometimes there is no substitute for a lush grassy paddock. “You’re working with horses after all. If you have the luxury of taking them out of a stable environment after a race, sending them to a farm like ours and just letting them chill out and freshen up, you don’t need an app to tell you that’s good for the animal.”
Leon Corstens. (Vince Caligiuri/Getty Images)
“You might have a horse with a low heart rate that sits in a good zone pre- race, but it might not be very fast. You’ve got to use the information as a guide, not a be-all and end-all, and trust a trained eye to understand each horse and apply the data accordingly.” The crossover between the trainer’s eye and technology is evident at Malua through a research project with Melbourne University, in which a horse’s gait is tracked throughout a racing preparation. “It’s an interesting one. Basically, we record a trot-up video from different angles at the start of a preparation for a base model, then again during the prep, after races or after work. We’re trying to identify any changes that the eye might miss. That could help predict points in a racing campaign when a horse changes its habits,” Larkin said. “Horses communicate in their own way. It’s about understanding as much as we can.” Perhaps the most obvious advance in racing technology in Australia over the past twenty years has been the proliferation of communication platforms that modern racing stables have come to rely on.
102 | 2026 OFFICIAL SOUVENIR MAGAZINE
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