Quote:
Originally Posted by parsixfarms
If I understood your post in a recent thread about figures put up the weekend of the Man O'War, I think we agree that this whole "projection" thing in slow-paced races shouldn't be done. Just let the figures fall where they may, and let the handicapper draw his or her own conclusions about the circumstances that led to the figure. A "projection" figure really becomes more a performance rating than a true speed figure.
|
I definitely agree with this. It is also a big flaw in the Moss pace figures because they use the Beyer figure to attain the variant for the day.
Here is an example for those wondering. Let's assume that we have three horses, one a dead front runner that consistently runs 80 Beyers, another front runner that runs 75s, and a closer that is capable of a 70 on his best day.
Now, today, the front runners hook up and run a very fast pace, about 20 points faster early than normal. The best front runner puts away the other late to beat him by two lengths. The closer comes "flying" late but doesn't quite get there, beaten a neck. Assume all the other sprints on the card were using a zero track variant.
Many times, the Beyer guys will just set this race on its own little island and use a different variant, in this case 10 slow. They will give the winner his usual 80, the other front runner his 75, but the closer will get a 79.
Now, the two duelers are probably getting an accurate reflection of their ability. The winner ran 90 pace, 70 speed while the runner up ran 90 pace, 65 speed. But the closer in no way should be getting a 79, but it happens every single day. I used a fast pace here, but it happens the other way around as well.
For the record, this isn't really a criticism of Beyer. The same thing holds true for Thorograph. What I'm doing is pointing out the flaw of using speed figures in isolation. It forces the figure maker to make decisions like this. You are going to get lots of individual horses wrong.
When it comes to slow pace, lets say several horses in a race are capable of a 100, but one only a 90. The pace is brutally slow and there is a blanket finish among the 100 horses with the 90 horse a length back. The clock says the race should get an 85. This happened in the Blue Grass a few years ago with Teuflesberg.
Do you boost the number to 100 to reflect the best horses ability and give the 90 horse a 98? Do you adjust the beaten lengths chart to show the race was actually much shorter than the distance run and penalize a length more than the standard chart? There are lots of ways to try to mitigate the problem, but none are perfect.