Dosage: Pedigree &
Performance
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Race Management: An Introduction
Understanding your horse and placing it in the right spot is essential to profitable racing. Assessing proper placement has always been a key to successful handicapping as well. Surprisingly, many horses are raced at the wrong distance, on the wrong surface, with the wrong style and against the wrong company because of a failure to comprehend the horse's individual strengths and weaknesses as well as the limitations imposed by its pedigree and aptitudinal type.
We have developed a proprietary spreadsheet technique for evaluating the unique characteristics of a runner. The key to the technique is the accurate measurement of a horse's class, speed, fatigue, efficiency and energy profiles.
A race-by-race analysis will quickly reveal the scope and limitations of a
horse's abilities. Patterns of performance will emerge. This will
allow for the best choices about his or her racing career.
Horses are constrained by their physiological limits. Biomechanics,
respiration and cardiac efficiency are just a few of a horse's attributes that
define its performance within a relatively narrow range. This range of
performance can be captured numerically and, over time, the numbers will become
a "fingerprint", unique to each horse.
The class measurement is closely related to our Performance Figures but in an expanded form. Performance Figures are similar to conventional Speed Figures, except that they integrate the speed over the entire course of the race rather than relying only on final time. In this way we can more easily appreciate the total performance from start to finish.
Speed and fatigue are also related since fatigue is a measure of how speed is expressed over increasing distances. At any given level of ability, horses that show speed early tend to slow down (or fatigue) faster than horses with less early speed. Conversely, horses with little early speed tend to fatigue more slowly. In a sense, speed and stamina are opposite sides of the same coin, one always being sacrificed in favor of the other. Our technique measures not only the relationship between early speed and fatigue, but the efficiency with which the speed is utilized throughout the race.
As a complement to the above, we also apply a modified version of Tom Brohamer's pace measurement methodology ("Modern Pace Handicapping", by Tom Brohamer, William Morrow and Company, Inc,. New York, 1991). These figures convert adjusted fractional times (in seconds) into a feet-per-second (fps) format. The fps format is easy to understand and will reveal that most of a horse's races display similar pace characteristics at various points in a race.
After just a few races, the complete analysis will identify a horse's likely class level, preferred racing style, preferred surface and preferred distance. This information is invaluable in optimizing your horse's opportunities.
Sample spreadsheets and summary pages spanning the 1997 two-year-old campaign of Horse-of-the-Year Favorite Trick and the three- and four-year-old campaigns of near turf champion Marlin may be seen by clicking on their name below.