richiebee Wrote:
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> This brings to mind another discussion which has
> been heard here and elsewhere...
> whether large margins of victory sometimes distort
> performance figures.
Maybe this is what you already meant, but that is also true outside of horseracing. Just look at football. We have a line that is supposed to represent the over/under of the expected margin of victory by the better team. However, in football, blow out wins sometimes happen. If the spread was 14 points, but the team won by 35 points, does that mean the spread was bad or somebody cheated? It seems to me that the 14 points is a shorthand for many different possibilities. It would seem unreasonable to say that a 35 point margin is reason for outrage if the spread was only 14 points. When people make football power rankings, they wrestle with the same issue.
Additionally, in the same vein as RichieBee\'s point, there seems to be at various times and places equine racing surfaces that yield larger separation between horses than one normally sees. It is a phenomenon.....but how to fold that phenomenon into other measurements is a conundrum.
Personally, I think the answer is that speed figures give you one view of the picture. You cannot put blinders on and only look at the speed figures. One needs to take into consideration the context a figure was earned in as well as the context the horse will be racing on the new day. Apologies if this is blaspheme here, but it also brings to mind designations that go with a figure and how important they are in considering a figure.
One thing I remember from my days using Ragozin is that they used to have a wind designation (g and G, if I recall correctly). It seems to me that some sort of designation to state if the day was a windy day could be helpful. And, while I am at it -- how about designations like XC and XH for extreme cold and extreme heat?
