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Barring calamities, Muhtarram trained by John Gosden looks likely to
be the favourite to win next week’s Derby classic at Epsom in Surrey. But
many punters will be backing dark horses in the hope of an upset. Many occasional
punters will probably pick their horse from the field on the day with the
aid of little more than a pin. But for racing devotees, the task of selecting
a Derby winner is a serious business, usually requiring a mental slog through
a mound of data on past races and rating of form.

This week however marks the arrival of a new computer database that
will delight almost all computer-literate racing buffs. Raceform, the Newbury-based
organisation that compiles the Jockey Club’s official records of all races,
is launching its annual yearbook in computerised form. This launch is the
latest move in the computerisation of racing.

No company or individual is using computers to work out and sell tips
per se. The majority of the computer-based systems on offer to British racegoers,
both horse and greyhound fans, simply provide faster access to the data
on which gamblers base their bets.

Neddybank of Newmarket, set up two years ago, has a database going back
at least seven years. Customers receive software to run on their personal
computers that enables them to download information from daily bulletin
boards released by the company. The amount they pay depends on how much
information they use.

Form guide by modem

Runners are announced at 11 am on the eve of the race by Weatherbys,
the secretariat of the Jockey Club. By 3.30 pm the same day, Neddybank commits
the information to a bulletin board, analyses the form of the individual
horses, and dispatches the data, together with the name of the jockeys,
via modem to subscribers. ‘Currently, the only method of obtaining the runners
together with the form of horses is via the racing press on the morning
of the races. Our clients receive the information in time to ‘study the
form’ the evening before,’ says Gareth Owen, director of Neddybank.

Owen stresses that ‘it’s not supposed to be a miracle system . . . it’s
just a tool for rating the form.’ Neddybank provides up-to-minute ratings
on trainers and jockeys, based on their fortunes in the previous fortnight,
and rates a horse on the basis of its form, class, improvement and suitability
for the going, which includes the distance of the race. Clients can apply
their own formulas to the raw data if they so choose, says Owen. He admits
that any system has limitations in certain types of racing, not least the
fact that they have to rely on historical data. ‘Many horses have only run
once, or not at all, and that’s where your only source of information is
from the stables themselves.’

OEM Systems of Rugby has been in the business for about two years, and
like Neddybank, provides a standard database to customers. Mike Suffield,
manager of sales and support, claims that OEM compiles its ratings from
20 or so facts per horse per race with additional analyses of the records
of trainers and jockeys. ‘We have a set formula for form ratings and speed
ratings of any individual horse, and the facility for users to put in their
own comments and ratings,’ he says. The company mails customers a disc each
week so that they can update their records.

‘It’s a fully comprehensive analytical tool,’ says Suffield. ‘The aim
is to select winners, and I think it does that very well. While it will
never replace newspapers, it’s the way the market will go over the next
20 years. You are wasting so much time if you are trying to do with a formbook
what you do with our system.’

John Whitley, a relative veteran of the use of computers in racing,
claims that his racecards and his Computer Racing Form annual represent
by far the most sophisticated use of computing in the British race scene.
Whitley, an expert in artificial intelligence, compiled his first annual
in 1984. Essentially, the difference is that his system focuses on previous
battles between horses, and handicaps them accordingly. ‘Many of the algorithms
used involve sophisticated mathematics, as might be expected,’ he says.

Raceform has opted for a window display of data; details of any selected
horse are flashed up on screen along with subsidiary inset windows. These
give additional information about the horse without the need to access other
files through a menu system. If the user keys in the name of a horse, four
inset windows appear at once. The first window lists the horse’s performances
over the past season, with a brief resume of its record over the previous
two seasons. Once the cursor alights on a particular race, information about
the named horse’s performance on that day flashes up in a comments inset
at the foot of the display. The comments change as the cursor moves from
race to race.

In a window on the right hand side of the display appear the details
of all the runners in a particular race selected from the first window.
Comments about each horse in the race flash up in the fourth and final comments
box underneath. Users can bring up records of competing horses without losing
their place in the file on the original horse.

Information about trainers, jockeys, sires and owners will be presented
in a similar format. The system will also allow users to find out what happened
when two horses last met in a race. Raceform is also issuing computer versions
of its Private Handicap, a publication listing detailed assessments of the
handicaps of individual horses. The supplement also contains figures that
provide punters with split-second ratings of horses over various distances,
at various weights and with various jockeys.

Offcourse automation

But to what degree can computerised information systems improve the
odds of punters winning on their bets? Again, the computer-based tipsters
are cagey, although they try to point out that they would not be in business
if there was no market for the information. Others are less sure.

Peter Shotton, managing director of Coral Stadia, points out that you
need an expert system of considerable complexity and that it has to be written
by a racing professional. ‘I don’t think there’s a commercial market to
justify that input,’ says Shotton, who manages the administrative computing
systems used at Romford and Hove greyhound tracks, and dismisses most existing
computing systems for punters. ‘They’re as unsuccessful as sticking a pin
in,’ he says.

The real problem is that so many variables are required to give a meaningful
rating – even for greyhounds, which are reputed to run more reliably. ‘With
horses, you also have the different distances, the different jockeys carrying
different weights, and a multitude of other variables,’ says Shotton.

Computers are widely used, however, in the administration of greyhound
racing although some attempts at computerisation have failed. Ladbrokes,
for example, has abandoned a prototype system for grading dogs into close
races. Most owners of greyhound tracks employ several trainers on a permanent
basis, and they not only train dogs for ‘ordinary’ outings but liaise with
race organisers who regularly monitor performances and place individual
hounds in special races where they will be closely matched, thereby increasing
the excitement of the race.

Ladbrokes attempted unsuccessfully to computerise this process. Gordon
Bisset, operations controller at Ladbroke’s head office in Harrow, says:
‘We ran a computer program for a while. It made staff reconsider some aspects
of the grading process. But when we tested it in the field, it was not a
panacea for the problems in greyhound racing.’

The new computer systems will certainly play a part in the Epsom Derby
next week, however. The Derby is ‘better than most races to predict because
of the breeding aspect,’ says Owen of Neddybank. ‘The real problem is its
extra long length of 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometres). The main thing is whether
the horse will stay the course. Epsom is also very uphill and downhill.
There’s a downhill after the final turn, and that sorts lots of horses
´Ç³Ü³Ù.’

So, any forecast of the winner of the classic race? ‘Too early’ say
the tipsters, as guarded as ever.

* * *

MORE TIME TO CONSIDER THE HORSES TO BACK

Computers may have arrived relatively late on the betting scene in Britain
but on the administrative side of racing they already play a useful role,
and will be the instruments of a major shift in administration this September.

For the first time, the same agency – Weatherbys of Wellingborough –
will declare officially both the names of horses in a race and the names
of the jockeys riding them. Weatherbys is the secretariat of the Jockey
Club and administers all race meetings. Until now, although the secretariat
has declared the lists of horses running the next day, it has been left
to a news agency, the Press Association, to find out and announce the jockey
for each mount. To make matters worse, jockeys may be announced as late
as 45 minutes before the race.

From this September, Weatherbys will announce both horse and rider on
the eve of the race using a computer system called ‘Overnight Declaration
of Jockeys’. Paull Khan, director of racing administration at Weatherbys,
says: ‘The majority of trainers will book jockeys at the same time as they
declare the horses. The objective is to have a comprehensive centralised
source of pre-race information, of which jockeys are an important element.