I say why split hairs....
In the 1983 book "The Race is Pace", author Huey Mahl once said: "Look at your wristwatch as 3-seconds tick by. Not very long, is it ?. Yet that is about the difference between a $1,000 claimer and a $100,000 super horse in a sprint! "...
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I use pace in my handicapping, and I firmly do not believe that a 10th or a 5th of a second makes much of a difference in the scheme and totality of the race ......What matters most to me is the relationship between the running line and the first and each succeeding fraction thereafter, versus what a horse accomplished during the running of those fractions....The effort and the length of sustainability of that effort put forth vs. the pace....
I like my contenders to have the
ability to Set, Maintain, or Overcome the pace of any given race vs. his opponent(s) ability....I just do not believe that measuring
"the blink of an eye" is worth anything, given the whole picture of any given race...It is the "sustainability and length of it" in a horse versus any given pace scenario that always catches my eye, and leads the way in my handicapping..... a point 1 or point 0 just gets lost in the overall picture of a race, imo..
Or to put it another way for anyone who would disagree with my way of looking at things.....How does this sound ?....I predict that my horse will win by a 10th of a second or a 5th of a second...Well, that is how I see it anyway..
My bottom line is: If a horse can SMO any pace, and is well placed, and is fit enough to prove this ability, then I could care less about any 5th or 10th of a second discrepancy in my pace assessments...