Apr 072010
Last year, some 620 million people flew the friendly skies and 1.5 million people underwent cosmetic surgery.
These are two of the many things – from cash registers to red light cameras – that we deal with on a daily basis, that are now controlled by technology yet still require a human hand. And racing is no exception.
Every day we put countless lives and untold sums of money in the “hands” of the 1′s and 0′s that make up binary code.
Every morning, hundreds of thousands of people wake up before dawn to stretch the legs of our equine athletes and prepare them for afternoon competition. When it comes to the races, most everything is electronic: from our internationally co-mingled wagering pools displayed on jumbotrons and toteboards, to the finish line cameras and claimboxes, to the starting gates that spring open at the touch of a button.
Perhaps my favorite of the human touches in racing is the clock. Baseball may have radar guns to quantify speed – we have guys with stopwatches.
Sure, the official finish time of a race is caught by two electronic clocks, but so much of what goes on in this game is still hand clocked. For those who haven’t experienced morning works, it goes something like this: trainer brings horse to track, tells gap attendant name of horse (sometimes they even tell the truth) and distance going, gap attendant relays that by radio to the clockers, horse works, clocker mutters under his breath, clocker relays time back to gap attendant, gap attendant tells trainer, trainer looks (un)happy, horse goes back to barn.
The average race fan probably doesn’t look too closely at works on PPs – unless there’s a string of bullets – but I wonder what they’d think if they knew that those official-looking numbers were really just really good guesses in the dark (oftentimes literally in the case of a Lukas or Asmussen horse).
Keeneland’s work tab was over 200 horses last Saturday and Wednesday’s 70 is thought of as a slow day. Take into account a track’s clocker team isn’t 5 guys – that’s a lot of stop/start/split button pushing. Consider that the 2005 National Economic Impact Study by the American Horse Council puts the value of the racing industry at $25,000,000,000.
For a sport that’s based on pure, raw animal instinct, that’s a lot of 1′s and 0′s.
photo courtesy of Rick Samuels
