TV COVERAGE of RACE.

[hobbes]

Simulcasting on the Right Track, but Still Far From Being Must-See TV
By Andrew Beyer
Friday, January 4, 2002; Page D06
"But the quality of TV coverage is still uneven. Many tracks still fail to recognize the needs of simulcast bettors while others have come up with excellent innovations that should be emulated everywhere.
The most important part of any simulcast is, of course, the race. Most tracks have adopted the use of a split screen, showing a close-up of the leaders on the bottom half of the picture and a broad pan shot of the whole field on top.
Typically, they show a single shot as the horses leave the gate, switch to the split screen as the field runs down the backstretch, and revert to a single shot for the stretch run.
Laurel, Hawthorne and a few other tracks have improved this system. They begin coverage of a race with a split screen, half of it with the normal pan shot and half with a head-on view of the gate. This is extremely valuable. More trouble occurs during the first few strides of a race than at any other stage and the head-on shot allows fans to see who is getting jostled, bumped or squeezed. After the first few strides, the normal split-screen shots appear.
No aspect of race coverage still provokes as many complaints as the stretch run. When a horse has a commanding lead in the stretch, the camera frequently puts him in a close-up shot while ignoring the rest of the field and any battle that might be occurring for second place. As a filly named Leveche ran away with a race at Laurel recently, she was the only horse in the picture during the last 13 seconds of the race. This is senseless when most viewers have bet exactas and trifectas and are vitally interested in the identity of the second- and third-place finishers.
Woodbine has found the right way to deal with runaway winners. When a horse has a commanding lead in the stretch, the Canadian track switches to an isolated camera shot, putting a close-up of the leader in a box at the bottom of the screen while showing the rest of the field in a pan shot. It is such a sensible solution that it should be universally adopted in this country.
After a race, bettors want to see the payoffs, the replay, as well as the head-on view of the race. But most television presentations become very inefficient after the race. They waste a minute or two showing the winner galloping past the finish line and back to the winner's circle while the race is being made official.
Beulah Park and Thistledown in Ohio, which run their races in rapid-fire succession, have found the way to make every minute count. As soon as a race has been run, they show a head-on replay while the results are being made official. Then they quickly post the results and show another replay, with the payoffs superimposed on a corner of the screen. Not a moment is wasted.
If racetracks continue to tweak their TV products in such an intelligent fashion, America's simulcast bettors may one day be content.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company

[cheesebeast]

A Program That Cuts To the Chase
By Andrew Beyer
Thursday, January 17, 2002; Page D01
David Ward has been intrigued for two decades by the promise of using computers to assist in handicapping the horses. Like an inventor whose basement is cluttered with gadgets both useful and fanciful, Ward has envisioned or developed many racing-related software programs, some of which have become reality while others are deemed economically impractical.
After testing a creation that falls into the latter category, I find it insufficient to use the cliche that Ward has developed the greatest thing since sliced bread. Who ever picked a winner with sliced bread?
Ward, 46, has been a racing fan since he grew up near Belmont Park. When he enrolled in a music school in Boston intending to become a jazz pianist, he soon was playing the horses at Suffolk Downs as much as he was playing the piano. His career path veered sharply when he recognized that technology was likely to provide a better livelihood than music; he earned a computer-science degree, started writing programs and eventually formed his own company, EquiSoft Inc., in Salem, Mass. As he worked in the corporate world, Ward dreamed of trying to couple his profession with his passion and use computers in racing.
"I wasn't trying to develop programs to pick winners," he said. "I was trying to find new ways to bring information to the horseplayer." I first met Ward in the late 1980s when he opened a laptop computer and declared, "Here is the racing form of the 21st century." The user could not only see the horses' records on the screen, he could click on certain data to obtain expanded information. For example, a click on a horse's pedigree would produce a statistical analysis of the sire's record at stud.
Ward was far ahead of his time, but he finally got his chance to work in the industry three years ago when the Daily Racing Form hired him as a consultant. He developed a product called Formulator, which brought the newspaper's past performances to the computer screen.
But Ward is constantly chafing to do more ambitious projects, and he understands what sophisticated bettors need and want. "My experience in dealing with serious players," he said, "is that they develop their own information, but it's very time-consuming to organize it." To this end, he created a program called Formulator Pro, and let a few people connected to the Daily Racing Form use it. My life as a horseplayer will never be the same.
Organizing information is indeed a daunting task. When I follow a track seriously -- as I do Gulfstream Park each winter -- I scribble notes on all the races in my programs, which then form my reference library. I start handicapping every day with the programs fanned out on my desk, and I transcribe my notes on every entrant onto the racing form. I have a printed record of my track-bias information from the country's major racing circuits, and I transcribe this data, too. I also compile pace figures and I must write these, too, on the newspaper. If there are 100 horses on a Gulfstream card, I may be looking up and writing 300 pieces of information before I even start trying to pick winners. But that was before Formulator Pro.
Now every scrap of information I collect goes into a computer. I type all of my trip notes, bias notes and pace figures into various grids in Ward's program. I download each day's performances in a normal fashion, but when I print them out, my own data is embedded into each horse's record. It is a personalized, customized racing form.
When I was transcribing my information manually, I didn't have time to look up information for more than a horse's most recent race. But now the computer preserves everything I have ever observed about a horse. If I made a long-forgotten note about a race six months ago, it still appears in the horse's record. As a result, I have become obsessive about gathering and saving as much racing information as I can.
Last month, because of a carryover jackpot in the twin trifecta, I was studying a race at Thistledown, one the entrants had last run at Fort Erie on Nov. 13. As I read the chart of this race in Canada, I noticed that all of the winners on the card had raced wide -- evidence of an anti-rail bias. Ordinarily this would be a scrap of information I would use once and forget. But now I entered it into my computer.
When I printed out the Gulfstream past performances last Friday, there was an entrant named Kashagawigamog whose last start was a poor effort Nov. 13 at Fort Erie. My data said "BR" (for bad rail), reminding me of the bias. And the comment in the past performances on the last race read: "Dueled rail, tired." When Kashagawigamog won, I hailed the result as a triumph for technology.
Unfortunately, it is expensive technology. Horse racing still doesn't have a vast audience of computer users, and a product like Ward's would appeal to such a small slice of that audience that the Daily Racing Form could never recoup the investment required to develop and market it. Other inspired ideas of Ward's have met a similar fate. For now, he'll have to be content with the satisfaction that a small number of handicappers recognize how visionary he is.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company