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STANDARD TIMES

I can get very hot under the collar talking about standard times and how difficult it is to compile them.

The following standard times have taken me months to prepare, working in every spare minute I’ve had.  If I could have relied on the accuracy of the information European racetracks provide I’d have been able to produce them in a few hours with a simple computer program.

  The sad truth is European racetracks simply don’t care about the information they give out.  They’ll describe a race as being run over a mile and a quarter when really it is a mile and a half.  They’ll record the wrong time for a race and quite often record no time at all.   They’ll move the running rails or the starting point and radically alter the distance of a race without telling the betting public.  They’ll say the going is ‘good’ when it’s obviously soft.

  You’ll often hear European racing officials lament the fact that bettors are increasingly turning to other sports.  They just don’t seem to grasp the fact that people prefer to bet on what they can understand, and that the inaccurate data European horse racing offers makes it very hard for them to understand.

  Okay, I’ve vented enough.  Now let me tell you about my standard times.  They show how fast a horse would take to cover every distance at every racecourse I’ve so far analyzed.   For example, a horse that would run five furlongs in 60.9 seconds at Tralee would take 91.3 seconds to run a mile – assuming it could stay a mile that is. The idea of providing theses standard times is to allow you to compare one performance with another by simply looking at the times horses have run.  To do the job properly you will need to estimate just how slow the weather and track maintenance have made a particular course.  In other words, you’ll need to produce full blow speed figures – or else refer to the ones I will be publishing on this website.