3) When I say nothing was done to the Belmont, I mean I didn’t subtract anything extra—the race got the figure it did because of the speed (or slowness) of the track. If you remember your speed chart you might recall that if a track gets slower, the effect in raw time is more dramatic as the distances get longer. The track was very slow on Belmont Day (Explicit got a negative number for shading 1:10) and the effect was magnified on the mile and a half race.

I wasn’t making figures when Secretariat ran. Sarava ran worse than Easy Goer and Point Given, better than A.P. Indy (wildly overrated) and Commendable. In general, as I’ve said countless times, race horses are getting better.

4) Like Ragozin and Beyer I make slight adjustments to each race. All other issues aside, teletimer and hand times aren’t perfectly accurate, and wind changes speed and direction during a race, so even if the track speed is unchanged you make small adjustments to each race based on the horses—in this case the track was the same 1 to 5, and my adds and subtracts were up to ¾ of a point, which is less than usual, if anything.

No, we do not use a “par time” for all types of races. When you start making your data base you use older horse claiming races for pars, because they are more predictable, but once you get even a reasonably solid data base you make your figures using the previous figure histories of the horses—it gives you way more “data points” (like 80 a day) to use than just using the winners of 3 or 4 races.

What I do when I approach a day is to start by going through quickly, taking each race on it’s own, to see if there is an obvious variant (or 2 possible choices) that make that race look really good. If there isn’t, I skip it, and go to the next one. After my first pass I usually have corrections over about half the races, and the day starts to take shape—the 2 routes might be within a point, so I’ll look at that variant for the third one, the sprints might have moved 4 points from the first to the last, so I’ll look at the middle races in that light, etc.



TGJB