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Originally Posted by mikekay
To take it another way...The chart says War Pass finished seventh, 23.25 lengths behind Big Truck in Tampa...who was probably having his picture taken when he finished. All the chart people can really say is how many lengths behind the sixth place horse he was...and then just calculate backwards from there???
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There is a device called a teletimer that takes a photograph of a small sliver of the racetrack at the finish line hundreds of times a second. After all runners have finished, the photos are joined together to create the finishing photo. The result is an image that looks like this:
This is what they show you when there is a "photo for win, place, or show", however it is a very long photo that covers all runners in the race. Like this:
Every point in that picture is on the finish line. What you can then do is mouse over a specific point on the photo, such as a horse's nose, to move the finish line to that point, and it will tell you the exact time when that photo was taken. You can then calculate how much time the horse in question was behind the leader, and convert this time to lengths behind the winner.