Re: Wind Adjustments? (666 Views)
Posted by:
Mall (IP Logged)
Date: November 29, 2005 04:43PM
Saying that a measurement cannot be made absent additional information, which is what I said, is very different than saying that there is no way the measurement can ever be made, which is what you seem to be saying. Drag is routinely measured for cars & in other fields, & could either be measured exactly or closely estimated for individual horses.
Wind does affect final time, but what the basic principles suggest to me is that the greater the liklihood that wind had a serious impact on final time, the greater the liklihood that a downward wind adjustment applied to the winner's number will represent the opposite of what actually happened.
Using PH's performance in the BC as an example, as a result of her trip she did not have to deal with running into what I understood was a 15 m.p.h. headwind for that race, yet her figure was lowered by some amount to reflect a wind adjustment. My take is that, if anything, the adjustment to PH's number should have been upward, not downward, & that the only way an adjustment to CL's number based on the number of lengths CL finished behind PH would represent what actually happened would be coincidence.
There are a number of ways to deal with this issue, including the one you seem to favor, namely relying on an overall impression gained from working with the data over a long period of time. My inclination is to take a very different approach, so I suppose this is another one of those issues where we'll simply have to agree to disagree.