Seriously unbelievable that you would use that day at Churchill as your example. I swear guys, this is not a plant, I don't know who Silver Charm is, he doesn't work for us, but thank you.

Yes, you are absolutely right.

1- On the Chilukki (sp?) day, I didn't know they did work on the track. But I knew it rained, and I knew that (especially in Kentucky) sometimes the first and last races have significantly different variants than the other races even when there is no weather (my guess would have been work on the track, but it ultimately doesn't matter what the reason is, just that it changed, you know it, and how much). The first race that day had I believe an entire field of first time starters, so there was not enough information available (in fact, none) to use the horses histories as a guide in making figures. This meant that the only way one could make figures would be to make assumptions about the track being the same (and therefore the same speed) as later in the day. Beyer and Ragozin did figures for the race, I left a box. Could it have been the same speed? Sure. Was it? Who knows. Given that it turns out they were working on the track, was it a safe assumption? Uh-uh.

2- Which brings us, once again, to the infamous 00 Wood Memorial day, where they both sealed and unsealed the track and it rained during the card. In the internet storm that followed, Friedman said no problem, they gave out the huge tops in the Wood by tieing it to the surrounding races.
And in June of this year he said, "we only slide our variant when the physical resiliency (sic) of the track changes-- a practice that produces accurate, objective numbers".

For the many of you who are new here, there are a lot of posts that deal with the complex questions of variant making. Some are "Figure Making Methodology" (5/2/00), "Changing Track Speeds" (11/17/01), "Split Variants, Bruno's Take" (1/3/02), and "Figure Making Methodology II", 6/10/02.



TGJB