Since there have been some comments on the Rag board concerning BG's 6 1/2f turf race, let me clear some things up. The amount of "cutting loose" required to get that figure right was negligible-- there were 3 turf sprints that day, and the total spread of variants for the 3 races was 2 points, certainly no more than average for a range of variants for a day, since between small timing variances and wind gusts anyone in their right mind would allow themselves a point or so of play in either direction from a variant even if they made the (silly) assumption that track maintenance and climatic conditions had left the track (or turf) exactly the same speed for each race. My guess is that Ragozin (actually probably Friedman, I believe he does their SoCal figures) got to that crazy fast figure by tying the race to surrounding days, a dogmatic position that I have discredited in the past (most notably with the story about the overnight watering of the two Belmont grass courses on different days, but that is just one blatant example).

By the way, the figure I gave BG for that race is plenty fast enough-- it's one of the fastest grass races any 3 year old has ever run, let alone run in February. As I said in ROTW, if he stays in one piece (which now appears unlikely) he will be tough to handle on grass.

I would also point out that one of the problems with getting a figure wrong is that the problem compounds itself-- you make figures using past figure histories of the horses (all serious figure makers do, invocations of "science" notwithstanding), and bad figures in the past mean more bad figures in the future.



TGJB