There’s nothing more basic to speed or pace figures than the accuracy of the times used to make them.  When I was working on the book, “Handicapping Speed,” part of the research was to trace the handling of time and speed from the mechanics of the gates, through the entire timing system, up to the photo finish booth, onto the timing slips, into the hands of the typists and publicity directors, to the point where it was passed on by the tracks to (at that time) the Daily Racing Form.

In spite of all of the different technologies and all the hands that the data passed through, the greatest potential for errors affecting speed and pace handicappers appeared to be the judgment calls that are made in estimating "lengths back" of non-winners.

That "appearance" was because I was making a major, unconscious assumption, which was that once the times were recorded in seconds and hundredths-of-seconds—that was the end of it.  From that point on, I imagined that perhaps a typo could creep in, but what else could go wrong?

Then one day last winter, a large envelope arrived from a fellow handicapper.  In it were printouts of race results from tracks around the country—in triplicate.  Times had been circled in red pen and there were numerous handwritten notes with exclamation points, and an irate letter asking why one of the racing data suppliers was providing different times at the points of call and/or finish in virtually every set of past performances.  Since Equibase now provides all data, he asked, why was this one supplier wrong so often?

[I must add right here that AXCIS was not among the suppliers and I do not know how they handle this issue. The rest, you can figure out.]

I had been using raw data files from three of the suppliers for some time and knew the raw numbers were essentially the same, but I never happened to print out all three suppliers’ own representations of their data after it was converted to fifths, for the same race.  Sure enough, there frequently was a difference of a fifth-of-a-second between times at any given split or at the finish.  This “wrong” supplier was consistently slow—but the occurrence of errors seemed to be random.

Anyone who doesn’t deal with times and speeds in horseracing might shrug—a fifth-of-a-second isn’t much.  But a fifth-of-a-second is the fundamental unit of measure in thoroughbred racing, originally because it was the unit of time on the clocker’s analog stopwatch.  Fifths have continued as the unit of measure out of tradition—and the fact that they are very convenient.

They represent approximately “one length” in thoroughbred speed (which I went to great effort to correct in the speed book, but nevertheless), for eyeball, seat-of-the-pants figuring, they are extremely convenient and I hope the convention never changes.

So with this in mind, the idea that one data supplier was frequently—but randomly—slow by a fifth-of-a-second was a shocking revelation.  Since only one was different, everyone who looked at the numbers assumed that they were wrong. I had raw data on hand from all three suppliers for the same races, so it took just a few minutes to see what was going on. This turned out to be an even bigger shock.  The one data supplier which differed from all the rest—Handicapper’s Daily (ITS)—was right!

Every bet I had ever lost while entering race times by hand in fifths flashed before my eyes.

There is no ironic twist coming.  Those twenty-odd years of bets—and sometimes inexplicable time results—are still passing before my eyes.

In all of my own computer programs, since data has been available off the Internet in decimal-seconds format, I have routinely used the same little algorithm I wrote at the very beginning.  It takes the raw time in hundredths and rounds it to the nearest fifth.  This is not ingenious.  How else would any handicapper—interested in speed or pace—do it?  It never occurred to me to do it any other way.  Apparently, the rest of the world does it differently.

I talked about this situation briefly in my presentation at the Daily Racing Form “Expo 2000” last spring in Las Vegas.  I have not listened to the tape, but I think if you do, you’ll hear that I was almost apologetic—I’m not sure why.  You may also hear a statement from someone in the audience to the effect, “The Form has always said it rounds down.”

I hate to break the news, but what they do is not “rounding,” it is truncating.  They simply drop whatever fraction-of-a-second is leftover, down to the lower fifth-of-a-second.

From the few brief comments from the Expo audience, I got the impression that some thought “rounding down” was OK, since it is consistently applied.  The practice itself may be consistent, but the result upon racing times displayed for the public is not.

What this means, in short, is this:  a horse wins a 6 furlong race in 69.99 seconds, and another horse wins a different race in 70.00 seconds.  The times are 0.01 seconds apart—one one-hundredth-of-a-second—far less than a heartbeat.  If you truncate the first decimal fraction to the lower fifth-of-a-second, it leaves 69.8, which shows up in print as 1:09:4.  The second time of 70 seconds flat doesn’t need to be truncated, so it prints as 1:10:0. Two horses—less than a lip apart—are now a length apart on paper (about a length-and-a-third, by my figures).

There is no way a handicapper can tell, by simply looking at the fifths or manipulating them in any way, whether the raw data was truncated a lot—or not at all.

You may have noticed that the Form has added the time in hundredths-of-a-second, along with fifths, for most races in their printed charts and in the results displayed on the Web.  This is a step in the right direction, but as you can see immediately by comparing a few times in the two formats, they have not changed from the method of truncating to the lower fifth.  And it does you no good if you are getting your data from past performance lines—where I am not for a minute advocating a change to decimal seconds. Fifths are much easier to read and I like them in the PPS—I just like them to be a little more accurate.

Some might argue that this inaccuracy has not hurt handicappers, again because it is “consistent.”  However, it is not consistent.  Horses randomly run times of 0.00, 0.01. 0.02, etc., until 0.19 rolls over to the next fifth at 0.2.  If you are a pace handicapper, and one horse runs to the first call in 21.99 while another runs the same distance in 21.80, yet both are represented as “21:4” does the difference of a length interest you?
 

Printed Time	21:4	45	58:4	1:05:0
Actual Time 1	21.99	45.0	58.99	65.0
Actual Time 2	21.8	45.19	58.8	65.19

When decimals are truncated, all of the times in the columns above are considered equal. Note that the times between splits can “accordion,” becoming longer or shorter, randomly, depending upon where a horse happens to hit a decimal.

I can only speculate on why they came up with this truncating convention to begin with, or why they stick by it.  As long as they do, however, the best advice to speed and pace handicappers is: do not use the converted fifths times from any of the suppliers who truncate. (The decimal times in the raw data files currently provided on-line are fine.)

One little surprise of our Handicappers’ Poll was that even among Internet users who download racing information electronically, almost 20% download it and then crunch the numbers by hand. This most likely means that they are printing the PPS and using the converted fifths format. Add to that untold thousands who buy the info already on paper, and this is a significant part of the handicapping world.  In spite of tongue-in-cheek cracks I’ve made in previous columns about bad information creating good odds, I don’t wish wrong information on anyone.

In case it’s not clear what’s going on here, the raw times in the background are the same.  Apparently with a few exceptions (such as Sun Ray Park, where it seems to come pre-rounded), the raw times are in seconds, to two decimal places.  What happens to the times after that is up to the suppliers who write the software to display it.  Someone somewhere has written a few lines of computer code which converts from the decimal format of “21.99” by truncating, to the fifths format of “21:4." Perhaps you can think of some valid handicapping reason why this would be desirable. I can't.

If you want to round two-place decimal seconds to display as fifths in your own spreadsheet or data base, one quick way is to add 0.005 to the two-place decimal and divide the integer of the sum by 2. Don't worry if you didn't get that; maybe your data supplier will.

Until all of the suppliers begin to round in both directions to the nearest fifth—not truncate to the lower one—there is a considerable handicapping edge available right now for speed and pace handicappers who do.