Millenium-- beaten "lengths" are a function of time. They have no way of measuring the distance. The photo finish camera takes a series of photos at high speed intervals AT the finish line, the photos are pieced together and presented as a strip, which is calibrated. The time is then measured by counting the calibrations, and expressed as "lengths", which as it turns out is not an exact term-- at least wasn't until I got involved and started yelling. By the time we get done with this it may be standardized.

Your account of the formation of Equibase is pretty close, except that the tracks approached the DRF first to try to get a reduced version of the pps to put in the program, for which they were willing to pay a royalty. The DRF turned them down, which turned out to be a $300 million mistake-- they were sold for $400 around then, most recently for about $100 now that Equibase has full pps in the program.

As I have said here before, the Equibase data base currently in use is the one that our own George White developed for the Racing Times when he was president there-- he knew EB was on a parallel path, and did a deal to share costs and the data. When the RT went overboard with "The Old Man", as George called him, EB had a fully functioning data base, and we became their first corporate client, with George setting up and running the Thoro-Graph data base. Eventually, the DRF figured out they could cut costs by buying the data rather than gathering it themselves, and George's little old data base is the only one in the industry.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/2005 06:16PM by TGJB.