"5 decent horses match up 3 times and the jockeys decide in advance to grab until the 1/4 pole in all 3 races.
Then in the 4th matchup, they all ride 'normally'
What do you think happens to the figure?"

Your wording hints at the problem here. What happens to the figure? That depends on who makes the figure. What happens to the final time? It speeds up.

The problems begin when you start asking yourself whether the makers of final-time figures should try to adjust for these slow paces.

If they do, should they adjust every horse in the race by the same amount? Even though this would mean adjusting frontrunners and deep closers by the same amount? Does doing that seem entirely kosher to you?

And if they do adjust for the slow pace, there is another problem. They might end up having to give very fast figures to horses who, simply put, did NOT run fast over the distance. Rather, they ran fast in a narrow, strategic sense. Whether this will translate to fast in a fairly run race is a different question. To exaggerate for effect, you could take a bunch of Grade 1 horses and throw them into a swimming pool and have them do the backstroke for a mile. Then you can cut the race loose from the dirt races that day and give the swimming horses numbers that fit best with their previous dirt races. This will work beautifully if the swimming horses duplicated their dirt form, but one can imagine the possibility that they didn't.

In other words, this is an extremely complex subject. The details are all full of devils.

Finally, if you're going to be literal-minded and give out very slow figures for slow-paced races, be sure to tell someone like Jerardi to alert people so that they don't take the numbers literally. And of course that was the real point of the article.