Excellent article on declining Beyer's of 3yo's

[Calzone Lord]

Originally Posted by Cannon Shell

So you are telling me that a beyer figure is generally exact within a length despite having no regard for pace, trip, in most cases weather changes like wind, harrowing of the track, etc? My question is how do you know if the figure is correct? Based on what evidence? It is all just an educated guessing game and when the numbers are 108 versus 105 I'm pretty sure that they fall within an acceptable margin of error.

No. You're bringing wind, pace, and trip into this and those are things that you know they don't account for.

If you took 5 competent figure makers -- and had them make a Beyer on a typical day when you have consistent weather conditions, accurate clockings, a race track that isn't being fooled around with a lot throughout the day, and a reasonable sampling of both sprint and route races to work with.

I would bet that virtually every single time -- all 5 figure makers would have every single horse to run that day on the card -- within no more than 2-to-3 points of each other.