question for TG

[Michael D.]

jerry,
i was watching the GP races on the OTB channel on monday, and rick lang said he thought the 1M race might have been timed wrong, and that he was going to call you and see what you guys came up with. did you guys come up with a different time than the GP timer? (i understand if you want to keep this to yourselves for now)

[TGJB]

I\'m still catching up from being away, I won\'t be getting to that day until late tomorrow or Saturday. I\'ll let you know.

[bdhsheets]

Has your man at GP had the opportunity to measure the new courses to see if in fact, the distances are true to the listings?

Thanks.

[TGJB]

Under ordinary circumstances we don\'t measure the course-- we did it that one time at Belmont many years ago when we were trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the two turf courses. Frankly, I wouldn\'t need time to do the race in question-- those were very solid older horses, and I\'ll be doing the race off them regardless. Time of that race could be useful in working out the relationship with the other turf race on the day, which was FMnw2 races 30 claimer, also unbelievably fast. But that aside, time doesn\'t matter for this one-- there was even no racing the day before or after. What would you compare the time to?

[TGJB]

Just to give a practical demonstration of what I meant, here are the sheets for the horses in the record breaking mile grass race from last Monday at Gulfstream, with the numbers they ran that day. As you can see, there is only one way you could possibly do the race-- if you add or subtract you would have to do it with everyone, and everything would come up out of whack. And this would be true no matter what the time of the race was. This also goes to the discussion I had with CH about grass figures a couple of months ago-- once you account for weight and ground loss, turf horses are very consistent, and the numbers fall into place very easily.

And boy, is that turf course fast. Yow.

http://www.thorograph.com/hold/gp_turf.pdf