From the other side of the pond whose author makes many salient points:
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www.thoroughbredracing.com]
5. That joke isn’t funny anymore
The kind of analytical slant that now is heavily featured on television in many sports is not everyone’s cup of tea. Fair play. Nobody, however technically minded, should have a problem with this as a choice. It’s a lifestyle choice for many to prefer ‘feel’ over measurement, instinct over studied appraisal.
However, the comments of trainer Dale Romans that “speed figures have become one of the biggest jokes in racing” is typical of the kind of rant made by racing’s traditional reserve.
Speed figures are nothing more than one staple measure of performance. They are not a threat to a different view of the world. The race is to the swift, and figures merely convert running times over different distances and on different surfaces onto a familiar scale that should prevent a lot of subjective waffling and nonsense.
Horses often break track records largely because the track is superfast, rather than the horse. Speed figures are there to stop us making a kindergarten error in confusing the two.
Okay, I agree that figures that take ground-loss, weight and even pace into account lose this advantage, and often lead us to descend into an exercise in playing with numbers. But, there is an appetite for them commercially because they have value to the horseplayer.
Speed figures merely put race times in their proper context. That’s all. They are not a panacea for all handicapping woes, but neither are they “a joke”.
Why does this running battle have to be waged? If a horse has run slow, it doesn’t make it a slow horse, only a slow performance. Speed figures don’t pretend to capture everything about a racehorse. They contain inevitable measurement error; they vary between operators according to that operator’s interpretation of the speed of the track; they are a knowingly one-dimensional abstraction of merit. Surely we can be grown-up about this.
You could teach school children to make speed figures without ever once straying from mainstream academic principles.
After one lesson, they would get it well enough to see the error of traditional thinking about time. After a few more lessons, they would start to learn about classical physics, biology, entropy, statistical inference, randomness, chaos, and many other things besides that are sparked by curiosity about the wonder of the equine athlete.
Speed figures offer a way into the sport for many people mathematically inclined, not privileged to own or train horses or who don’t care to speak the code of racing’s insiders or who trust all their received wisdom. They are for people who want to learn additional awe for great horses via computation, not via visuals, instinct and emotion, which certainly have merit but can be flawed.
They are definitely not “a joke”, Mr Romans.
