So you abandoned 3/4 of your earlier post. Good, it was really silly.

The short answer to THIS post is that some of those things exist and some don't, some that do are irrelevant, some are reflected in final time and thus in figures, some may matter from time to time, and all or none may in a given case be reflected in a horse's record. The original question was not whether other characteristics exist or are important (or even how important), but whether looking at accomplishment, as distinguished from ability, is a good idea. The logical extension of that type of thinking is that every horse's odds (which to a large extent reflect accomplishment) will be basically accurate, or that the prices of stocks are always accurate-- you might as well use a hat pin, right?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2005 07:04PM by TGJB.