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Professional Punter Alan Potts Writes On Sectional Times
At the 2012 London Olympics:
Mo Farah won the Men's 10,000 metres by 48/100th of a second
Usain Bolt won the Men's 100 metres by 12/100th of a second
At Salisbury in May 2023, a horse I owned ran in a 1M 4F handicap:
Eagle Court won that race by 1/100th of a second
That was in a race that lasted 2m 42s, or 16,200 hundredths of a second. When you think of all the things that can happen in a race, how many ways could a horse gain or lose more than . 1/100th of a second. And yet we manage to produce betting prices which are remarkably accurate in predicting race outcomes. There’s decades of results that confirm, for example, that of all the horses that start at 5/1, just under 15% will win. The trick of course is to find that 15% and not all the others.
But when have you ever heard anybody involved with racing, or in the racing media, discuss how tiny the margins are between success and failure? This is a sport in which one second is a very wide margin. In a flat race on good ground, one second represents about six lengths, on soft ground perhaps five lengths. Which is a useful marker, as it tells you that just about every flat race you’ve ever watched, or bet on, had a winning margin of less than one second.
When you see a horse win by a bigger margin than that - Shergar in the Derby, Frankel in the Queen Anne, everybody accepts that we’re seeing something exceptional. And any prospect of making money backing those horses in future races is greatly diminished. But in a race in which the winner scored by two lengths, or one third of a second, most punters would fully expect the result to be the same if the first two met again on the same terms.
It’s hard to say which is more remarkable, the belief that the result would be the same, or the fact that in most cases, it would be the same. If with a different time gap one way or the other. It was another horse I owned that first got me thinking about this remarkable consistency of results, something we mostly take for granted. Salute ran twice in the same 1M 6F handicap at Wolverhampton, run on the Saturday before the Cheltenham Festival.
In March 2007, Salute (9st 2lbs) won by 1 1/2L from Pass The Port (9st 3lbs). Two years later, they met again in the same race. This time Salute (9st 4lbs) won by 1 1/4L from Pass The Port (9st 8lbs). The jockeys were different for both horses, the opposition was different, both races took just over three minutes, both horses were (obviously) two years older and both had run multiple races since the first encounter, but not only was the result almost identical, so was the way the race developed. In both races, Salute hit the front early in the straight and in both, Pass The Port emerged from the pack as the main danger, but couldn’t close the gap.
It would have been fascinating to see that pair meet somewhere else, maybe even on turf. Just to know if it was the nature of races at Wolverhampton that somehow suited them, but put that tiny difference of around one quarter of a second between them after three minutes of racing. But they never did cross swords again.
Obviously the data from the Eagle Court race comes from the modern availability of sectional timing at all meetings. I’m yet to be convinced that sectional times compared across different races are much help in finding winners. But they certainly can give an insight into the way an individual race was run. That win at Salisbury for Eagle Court came when he made up a gap of 0.4 seconds in the final furlong. But anyone that saw the race would probably argue that the runner-up, Vega Sicilia, threw the race away by hanging both left and right in that final furlong.
You can watch that race here - Eagle Court in dark green, Vega Sicilia big white blaze:
https://www.racingtv.com/watch/replays/2023-05-04/salisbury/1620
The sectional times offer an alternative explanation.
These are the furlong splits for both horses from 4F out to 1F out:
Eagle Court : 13.72 13.33 13.58 Total 40.63
Vega Sicilia : 13.25 12.94 13.26 Total 39.45
In the space of three furlongs, Vega Sicilia went from 0.78s behind Eagle Court, to 0.4s ahead of him. Each of those three splits for Vega Sicilia was faster than any of the other eight horses in the race. He was clearly the best horse in the race at the weights, and he went on to prove that in his two following races. But racing on soft ground, did he run those three furlongs too fast and was it fatigue that caused his wandering in the final furlong? On that day the tortoise beat the hare, the even pace run by Eagle Court edged out the horse with the better speed, but speed that was perhaps over done in the conditions.
I certainly thought Vega Sicilia would be a good bet on better ground. Two weeks after Salisbury he ran second again, but in a field of 18 at the York Dante meeting, beaten by the much improved Kihavah. Then he won at a Goodwood evening meeting in June, after which he was sent to the Newmarket July sale, where he changed hands for 125,000 gns. My tortoise had cost me eleven grand!
So that’s one example of drawing conclusions from sectional times. But the thing that has been most apparent from a lot of the races I’ve looked at, is how often a race is won or lost by what happens in the first furlong. I could offer plenty of examples, but this is one from the highest class of race, the 2022 1000 Guineas.
There were 13 runners, but only three of them went under 15 seconds for the first furlong, and two of those three finished first and second. Cachet made all the running - her 14.67s for the first furlong was 0.27s faster than the eventual runner-up, and more than 0.4s faster than the better fancied runners. The Coolmore favourite, Tenebrism, conceded 0.73s in that first furlong. Cachet maintained a strong early pace and just lasted home - each furlong she ran slower than the one before, but the lead she’d stolen from the start was the key to her win.
This poses an interesting question for punters - how can we predict what will happen in the first furlong and how can we incorporate that into pricing up a race. Now I’ve pondered this for quite some time now and I haven’t come up with any answers. Simply knowing that a horse will try to gain an early lead and make all would be a help - but if the jockey goes too fast early, even by two or three tenths of a second, the petrol gauge will hit empty before the finish. And the quick horse through the first furlong, still needs the class and basic ability to win in the grade of race you’re considering. ,
In the end, I’ve accepted that sectional times are only really useful as information on how a race was run. And that can be helpful in understanding how an outsider has managed to win, or go close, but might be worth opposing next time if the price takes the form as conclusive. As the subsequent form of Cachet showed, this sort of ‘first furlong’ win tends not to be repeatable. In her case, Newmarket was the ideal track, the plan was perfectly executed by the jockey and the opposition were perhaps caught napping. And Cachet was good enough and just as importantly I think, fit enough after a prep in the Nell Gywn.
Of course I don’t expect this idea of talking about the small margins in terms of time to replace the use of distances in race results. If you follow racing, you know what a short head looks like. If somebody tells you their horse won by a short head, you can form a mental picture of that, because you've seen enough photo finishes. What teachers called knowledge gained through experience.
But if you're told the horse won by 1/100th of a second, you have no experience or knowledge that makes that understandable. Try this website, hit start and watch the number on the end, which is the one that changes every 1/100th of a second:
https://toggl.com/track/online-timer/
It's just a blur, even the number that measures tenths of a second is never still long enough to allow any clear picture to form in your brain that could provide the experience needed to understand these tiny amounts of time.
But if you’ve backed, or better still owned, the winner, who cares whether it officially won by a nose or 1/100th of a second!
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