All right, look. I haven't been going after Ragozin recently, mostly because, as anyone who goes to their site can see, they are pretty much a non-factor on-line-- their clientele consist almost exclusively of hardcopy users, so I couldn't reach them here even if they were open minded, which for the most part they are not. But they've done it again-- and it defies belief.

Over the last few years we have shown a LOT of errors they have made in big races. I'm not talking here about variant decisions that are a function of the differences in methodology we have discussed here at length before-- I am, again, talking about flat out errors. The ground loss relationship between Noble Causway and High Fly in the Florida Derby, the famous "rail" trip of Touch Of The Blues in the BC Mile, Senor Swinger in the Wood, the ground and phantom "off poorly" in the last BC Sprint-- these are all things we have pointed out publicly, and showed how anyone who wanted to could check replays and see that we had it right. And in all cases Friedman et al stonewalled it-- they either ignored what I said or continued to maintain they were right, no matter what your eyes told you, AND DIDN'T CORRECT THE ERRORS. As I have said before, this is a pretty cynical calculation-- they figure most of their guys won't even know about the error, so they are better off not correcting it-- if they did change it, people would start asking questions.

In fact, some of you might recall they also had a little problem with the beaten lengths in last year's Derby-- they input the wrong lengths, adding an extra 3 to the gap from third to fourth, affecting the figures of everyone from fourth on back by 1 1/2 points. Again, when I pointed it out they denied it, and didn't fix the problem-- giving their customers figures they knew were wrong, in the biggest race of the year.

Now, you would think they would learn. We have 3 different guys cover the Derby, due to field size and importance of the race, and if there are discrepencies we have a fourth look at it (usually me). With all the errors we have caught and made public in MAJOR RACES you would think by now Ragozin would do the same, or at least check against our stuff when we post it, to take a look at discrepencies before he posts theirs. BUT NO...

This year the three ground guys who covered the Derby for us agreed pretty much straight down the line-- some guys have all the horses a little tighter or wider, but there were no significant differences in the relationships, and the ground you see on the page represents the average of the work of all three. Now, we generally run about 3 1/2 points faster than Ragozin, and based on that they had the race going about a point slower than we did, a judgement call. Given that, for the first 5 horses there are no major problems-- they all run between 4 1/2 and 5 points slower than we had them. After that things start getting weird with Wilko, Flower Alley-- and especially Andromeda's Hero. They have AH 2 1/2 points out of line, which means 5 paths on the turns-- and it's 2 1/2 points WORSE, which means five paths LESS than it should be. Since the horse was essentially 2/3, that means the horse would have to have been running a full path inside the rail on both turns.

As I have said before, these are errors in the biggest races of the year-- you can draw your own conclusions about the day to day work. Len-- tell me again about 1/2 point accuracy, and those 1/2 point condition moves.



TGJB