|
Monster Horses: Part 2
Being a photo-finish operator is pretty much an entry-level job at the track. The first
one I met was actually pretty good at it, although he had no aspirations at the track at all, and when he applied for the job, he thought "Photo-Finish" meant that he would be finishing photos over at
K-Mart or something, and he would have been just as happy if it had. But, he loved the hours; he could sleep till noon. He couldn't fathom why anybody would be interested in the process of collecting race finish
photos, but was flattered that, since I was researching a book at the time, the "press" was interested.
He gave me an earful. I wish I could re-run the tapes of those meetings, because, he and one
other guy that year, told me about "ten-foot rails." I was interested in how different tracks make the lengths-back calls at the splits and finish, and who makes the call (much too lengthy a topic to begin
right now--because it does in fact vary, and there is no standard). And, these two photo-finish operators, one who did not make the lengths-back finish calls at his track, and one who did, said something about using
the ten-foot distance between rails as a measure of lengths on the photo-finish speed strip. There is only one problem, but it didn't hit me until later: on a speed strip, nothing is stationary!
The film
moves and only things that pass by the tiny slit at the finish line get smeared onto it. Like horses and riders. Rail posts do not get on the film. If one did, it would be the finish rail post and it wouldn't look
like a post, it would be a smear, the entire length of the film. What was it these masters of their craft were seeing on the strips and counting as ten-foot rail posts? I have no idea.
But, although I have
always used eight feet in my figure calculations, this experience and a few others, like hearing about the work of that Huey person, left me with a little apprehension that maybe there was a better average length of
a race horse. It finally dawned on me to simply try other lengths in the calculations and see what happened. When you do, you get impossibly slow or fast splits and final figures, which bring you right back to eight
feet.
The issue of monster horses came up for me again last winter, when I was invited to Handicapping Expo, and I made the mistake of choosing to talk about accuracy in speed and pace figures (it was tough,
watching an audience go cross-eyed in unison--maybe next time I'll talk about fertilization of fields for grazing race horses). Anyway, it struck me that this eight-foot/ten-foot business is really fundamental to
everything else I do, so I wondered how to convince the ten-foot-aficionados, that these suckers really are two feet shorter.
What I wanted to do was give everyone at the seminar a Stanley model 33-423 and a
horse, and let them have at it. But, since I couldn't do that, I thought it would be pretty funny to have a giant ruler, and take a picture of a horse with it. So I made one--sparing no expense for props and special
effects--I measured and painted a twelve-foot, one-by-eight like a big ruler. My own horses are quarter horses and I knew I'd get flack for that--somebody would want to multiply by four, or something--so I asked
around among friends and came up with the quintessential thoroughbred.
His name is Silver Surfer and he stands of all places, in Socorro, New Mexico, so I only needed to haul the huge ruler about two miles.
Surfer ran out about $345,000 at the handicap level, mostly on the west coast, and what impressed me most was he ran and retired sound at about nine years old. As stallions go, Surfer is very gentle. Which means
that he may kill or maim you at any moment--but it would be unintentional. Since my friend had been catching him every afternoon to breed mares, we were uncertain how long he would be willing to stand in front of a
"ruler" while I snapped his picture. What a laugh. This horse had been in the winner's circle so many times that when I climbed in the pen with a camera on a tripod, he pawed the ground eleven times, to
tell me the f-stop.
We had the ruler standing on two legs against a fence and the horse standing perfectly parallel to it, and I concentrated on watching through the lens while my friend lined up Surfer's
butt with the zero. When it was exactly on, he froze and I looked over the whole frame for composition--ready to capture history--and my heart stopped. Every bet I ever lost with figures passed before my eyes.
Silver Surfer's nose, standing at rest, was at the ten foot mark on the ruler!
This is a family newsletter, so I can't repeat what I said, but I stopped everything and got out Stanley, and re-measured my
painted "ruler," which hadn't changed. I re-measured the horse, which was still eight feet. I fell to my knees and thanked the gods of geometry. Guess what? When you look at a horse as you normally do,
across a track (or from a camera on a tripod), and the horse is two, three, or four feet toward you from the rail, they appear to fill the space between the (ten-foot-apart) rail posts. If the rail posts are set on
twelve-foot centers at your track, there are times when they will appear to fill those too. Now extend your arm straight out toward the horse and stick your thumb in the air vertically. Bend your elbow and bring the
thumb closer and closer to your eye until it exactly blots out the horse and the space between the posts. You now have a twelve-foot thumb.
I moved the mega-ruler around to the front, touching Silver Surfer,
and he seemed to consciously pose, while I took his eight-foot picture. [I really like this horse, and if you've got some mares that can run a distance, maybe we should talk.] I thought this picture was hilarious
(especially since Surfer thought we were measuring something else, which he put to good use a few minutes later) but I don't know that it made much of an impression on anyone at the seminar.
Eight-foot,
ten-foot, what's the difference? If you don't handicap with figures it makes no difference whatsoever. If you do make figures, it matters a lot. The lengths-back of horses at the finish line are estimated visually
in different ways by different personnel at different tracks. Regardless of how it is done, there is always some slop at the finish, and much more at the splits, where they are often taken off a moving tape by
totally different (and sometimes indifferent) personnel, of whom only the real sticklers for accuracy may extend the effort of pressing a finger to a button to actually freeze a frame--and then the angles of the
camera toward the call points may obliterate any sense of "lengths."
So there's slop built in, but for laughs, suppose your track estimates lengths-back at the finish from a speed strip photo in a
reasonably accurate manner. You want to calculate the actual time, speed, pace, velocity, or whatever tickles your fancy, of a horse that is recorded in the Form as finishing four lengths back. If a length were ten
feet, that would be forty feet that you would crank into your figures. If a length is eight feet, it is thirty-two.
That's a difference of eight feet--one length for every four. In some circles, that's called
a twenty-five percent error.
A six furlong race covers 3,960 feet. A ten-foot Clydesdale would run 396 lengths to the finish. Thoroughbreds run 495.
My approach to figures uses numbers like these, so I
have to be very careful that errors don't get magnified by things like "99"--the number of lengths difference between ten-foot and eight-foot horses running six furlongs.
If your approach to figures
uses lengths only for the purpose of calculating feet-behind at the finish or splits, which you then convert to something else like velocity, then the difference is going to be relatively small. Only a length or
two...and what's a length or two at the finish?
Copyright(C) 2003 Charles Carroll - DesertSea.Com
This text can not be reproduced without the written permission of
Charles Carroll
|
|
