Data Points
Marketing horse racing through its rich data is on the agenda for the 2013 UA-RTIP Symposium on Racing and Gaming:
New Ways to Look at Numbers
Sports fans are traditionally a group of people who have an insatiable hunger for facts, figures and statistics. Racing is a sport that is data rich but that attribute hasn’t been marketed. Panelists look at new data that could be presented to the racing audience, new ways to present the information we currently provide as well as how all of it can be used to attract new customers and increase the frequency of current players.
It’s also the subject of Thorotrends’ call to “release the data,” which I hope the Symposium data panelists will read before they arrive in Arizona, along with everything Superterrific has gathered on the issue of freeing racing data from paywalls and PDFs in her latest on Exacta-mundo.
Making data more available can only help attract more horseplayers. I’ve believed so for as long as I’ve been a racing fan, and have only been confirmed in that belief watching other sports move ahead with data, whether in creating APIs, building it into mobile apps, supporting hackathons, or holding events such as Major League Baseball’s Bases Coded, in which teams competed “to create the next great interactive media product for baseball fans.”
Note, I’m not advocating that past performances and other handicapping products should be free, or that Equibase should release all the data it collects via an API without restrictions, although I do think it should release the majority of its data and without a significant lag. (Just as full charts can be downloaded within a hour of a race, so should race data.)
If you’re wondering what free(er) data might look like in racing, consider the models that already exist, ranging from MLB’s minimalist Gameday API to ESPN’s robust developer center. Imagine if Equibase created something similar to ESPN, which opens its data feeds to users for non-commercial applications with some usage restrictions (such as limiting the number of API calls within a set period) — as Thorotrends writes, the majority of racing fans would continue to use data as they always have, but there would be a small group who would hack and experiment. It would make racing feel less stagnant and less mysterious, leading to more fans and more wagering.
Market the data, certainly, just free the data first.
10/14/13 Update: Yes! From Dana Byerly, here’s a real-world example of how a horse racing API could be used.
Top of the World
This is how good Treve was winning the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe:
An RPR of 130 is bang on average for an Arc winner, but, if we factor in her 1.5kg (3.3lb) fillies’ allowance, it would have taken a 134+ performance from a colt to have beaten her on Sunday — and the last Arc winner to achieve that sort of figure was six-length winner Sakhee back in 2001.
Breeders’ Cup Stats
Winners win: 48% of Breeders’ Cup winners in the past 10 years won their final prep race, according to Jon White’s research, and 86% finished in the money. Of course, most Breeders’ Cup starters are coming off strong performances — in 2012, 28 of 59 runners on BC Friday won their last race (43 were in the money), and 41 of 103 on Saturday did (75 were ITM). In 2011, 29 of 69 runners on BC Friday won their previous starts (55 were ITM), and 40 of 104 on Saturday were winners (80 were ITM).
New York wins? Heading into last year’s Breeders’ Cup, starters coming off a prep race in New York didn’t have a great record in Arcadia. In the five previous Breeders’ Cup runnings at Santa Anita, 17 New York-prepped horses finished in the money, and only one won. In 2012, though, horses who prepped in New York won two races on BC Friday, and four races on Saturday. Another four finished second or third on Friday, while five did the same on Saturday, out of a total of 11 New York starters on Friday and 25 on Saturday. The Classic was a particularly New York affair — the top four finishers all last raced in the Jockey Club Gold Cup or the Woodward.
Stats and charts for every Breeders’ Cup are available here.
Super Saturday 2013
Today’s group and graded stakes with potential Breeders’ Cup implications from Newmarket to Churchill Downs, listed in order of approximate post time:
Race names link to summary results, winner names to replays.
There’s also the ungraded Unzip Me Stakes at Santa Anita (post time 9:14 PM ET), and almost a full card’s worth of maiden special weights for juveniles: Race two (1:36 PM ET) and race three (2:07 PM ET) at Belmont; race one (4:00 PM ET), race three (5:04 PM ET), and race four (5:37 PM ET) at Santa Anita; and race three (6:56 PM ET) and race six (8:30 PM ET) at Churchill Downs.
Among the many notable runners today are Pachelbel, the first foal of Music Note, winner of several stakes, including the 2008 Mother Goose and 2009 Beldame, making his first career start in race two at Belmont for trainer Kiaran McLaughlin, and Take Control, the now 6-year-old son of Azeri and A.P. Indy making his first start in more than a year and just his fourth career start overall. What’s he been up to? That’s a good question.
1:00 PM: Hello Race Fans picks for today’s 10 G1 races are up.
The Moment
When trainer John Shirreffs knew that he wanted to work with Thoroughbreds:
“I got on his back, and I could feel his heart pumping under my legs,†Shirreffs, 68, said. “It was so clear that he wanted to work with me. It was magnificent, and from then on I wanted to know everything about them and the people who worked with them.â€
Less poetically, it was 10 years ago today that I and Mr. Railbird went to Suffolk Downs for the first time and won $39 on a chestnut gelding named Ascot Doll. My life hasn’t been the same since, and I couldn’t be more grateful — for every friend I’ve met through horse racing, for every opportunity I’ve been given in the game, and to every horse I’ve watched run.
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Jessica Chapel writes and edits in Massachusetts. Railbird is a Thoroughbred horse racing blog published from June 2004 to July 2019. More / Contact
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