I think that most of the responses to my post about the effect of ground loss on a horse’s time in a race were snarky and abusive. That’s ok because it’s kind of what this board is about.
But what if my claims were well founded? What if I really have been able to establish a useful metric for this otherwise elusive fact about racing? What if you just suspended your disbelief to ask ‘what if this guy is telling the truth?’
Curiosity should alone be enough for you to ask a few questions; to get under the claim to an understanding of what I am saying. Maybe I can help you understand this if I put it in different terms.
There are two laws of physics at work in a horse race that tend to slow a horse down if it has to battle against them. Without getting scientific, let me point them out. In a straight-away a horse loses its momentum when it has to change paths to get in the clear. Angling in or angling out have the same effect. I’ve determined that the loss of time or speed is about one percent for each path that a horse has to cross to get clear in a straight-away.
In a turn there is a different force at work. A horse has to battle against the force to keep its path and stay in line during a turn. This is especially difficult because there is NO straight line in a turn path; the ground loss is continuous. I’ve estimated that a horse loses about four percent of its time or speed if it has to race in the 2 path in a turn and another single percent for each additional path that it is forced out.
These may seem like small amounts of speed loss, but they add up. Especially in a two turn or three turn race. When you add the time back in to a horse’s speed it tends to smooth out the wildly varying times they show for multiple races over the same distance and the same surface. The calculation gives you a view of the horse’s basic ability under a specific set of conditions.
I made a comment that this is mostly true with mature horses, because younger horses tend to improve greatly as they learn more and get stronger from race to race. There is no hard metric that helps predict this. But even with younger horses, this approach separates the contenders pretty well.
There is so much data available about racing that all that I’ve done is grapple with some of it in order to understand it better. This is not an attack on the TG metrical base. It’s just a little bit more insight. And it does result in the outcomes that I discussed previously. If you don’t believe it, I am sorry for your loss.
