I'm going to have to do this faster than I would like, because there is a lot going on, and I have to leave early, but my guess is there will be plenty of follow up discussion anyway.

A generation of humans is usually thought to be 25 years, and human athletes have made large strides over the last 25 years-- check out the roster of an NFL team from the 70's, and you will see that players now are much bigger, stronger, and faster. There are a lot of reasons for this-- nutrition, sportsmedicine, better training methods, etc. If anyone knows of studies measuring athletic improvement over the last 25 years I would love to know about it.

A generation of horses is probably about 6 or 7 years, and on top of the above mentioned factors you can throw in selective breeding, which improves things with each generation. Also, humans have some say in what drugs are administered to them, horses don't. It would be shocking if horses were NOT getting better.

So, how is this reflected in the times of races?

1- Take a look at the times for the Derbies since 1995, and compare them to those before then. They have been much faster.

2- It is tougher to break track records when 1000 races have been run at the distance than when only 100 have-- more times to beat. Still, there have been quite a few track records in recent years-- Kelly Kip had a few himself, Najran the other day, etc.

3- I had conversations with Jerry Porcelli, track superintendent of NYRA, and Joe King, his predecessor. Turns out that tracks used to be mostly clay, which provided fast times when dry, much slower when wet and sticky (which goes to the whole question of races collapsing on off tracks). Over the years tracks have added a higher percentage of sand to help dry things out quicker. Porcelli used the beach analogy-- when dry, sand is slower than clay, but gets faster with moisture, like running on the wet sand near the water. This also goes to a lot of the issues that have come up here before related to tracks changing speed during a card, and horses handling wet tracks (Ragozin almost always has those races collapsing, probably because they used to). But the upshot is, "fast" tracks are slower than they used to be.

4- Our figures have gotten faster over the years because horses have gotten faster. Ragozin's did not because they locked the figures to fixed par values-- the premise was that 10k claimers etc. were the same year after year, for which there is no logic-- if horses as a group are getting faster you won't know it. I had a dialogue about this with Friedman on their site a few years ago under another name, and since then Ragozin's figures have gotten faster, which may or may not be a coincidence. In any event, as a result our figures have "gotten faster" while theirs have not, at least not as much. So we started out a couple of points slower, and now are a couple of points faster.

Mr. Porcelli also told me some things about banking of turns, but they don't apply to the question at hand.



TGJB