CHAPTER FIVE

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SPEED FIGURE STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL

As I mentioned earlier, retrieving speed figures from the weekly results supplement or from exercise books can be a nightmare.
I know this from experience because that is how I started keeping them. Finding previous figures for a sixteen runner race and copying them out could take hours. After a few weeks I started to keep the figures on a database. Being computer illiterate I managed to mislay the figures on several occasions only to find them somewhere else later. The final straw came when they were lost altogether after the computer crashed. I decided to do something about it and enrolled on a computer course with Learn Direct.
During a lifetime of hesitation and indecision I had not made too many good moves. This was certainly one of the best. In less than a week, after completing a database course I could use ‘sort records’ to keep the file in alphabetical order, ‘find’ to locate each horse and ‘show marked records’ so I could view only the horses I needed for a race. I was also able to copy and paste these horses to other pages and was soon compiling race cards for entire meetings.
At this stage I was still having to use the results supplement to find out which course and over which distance each figure had been earned. I realized I could save all this time by coupling this information to the speed figure, so I added S for Southwell, W for Wolverhampton and L for Lingfield. After these abbreviations came the distance but limited to three digits to save space. So at Wolver for instance, races shown as 1M are in fact IM100yds and races over 1M 6f 166yds are shown as 1M7. Finally winners were identified by placing an * after the speed figure. A horse that had earned a rating of 70 when winning at Wolver over 7f would be shown as 70*W 7F. With all these improvements in place and my new found computer knowledge I could now run off a seven race card in less than half an hour.


You have now seen where the figures come from and how to store and retrieve them. It is now time to move on and see what they look like. Below are the ratings for runners in the 2003 Winter Derby. Fourteen runners went to post but only eight had run on the all weather since September.

Parasol was top rated last time out and opened at 7/2 before going off 5/2jf with Kirovski. Dettori made all on Parasol quickening 3f out to go 3l clear and just held on from Adiemus who was held up and ran on well inside the last. Parasol posted a rating of 85 and a track record for the new polytrack surface.

1. PARASOL 5/2 JF
2. ADIEMUS 11/4
3. GOBLET OF FIRE 25/1