After an excellent turf season it seems clear that this AW season is taking the same shape as last year's - very few better class handicaps - so that for those like me who focus solely on the Flat, it is largely a question of waiting 'til April.
The silver lining to an otherwise quiet period is that one has time to review and make such modifications to one's approach as may seem necessary. My main priority has been further to speed up the bringing together of the data I need for each race. Some Saturdays in the peak of the last turf season there were six, eight or more races I'd ideally have liked to analyse, far too many for the time available. So some speeding up of data processing has been instituted and hopefully a final programming task submitted to Peter Clayton. IF he is able to do what I hope then, fingers crossed, next Summer I should be able to get out the data for up to a dozen races in not much over an hour.
On the methodology front, several of the obiter dicta within the VDW body of work have been, or are being, explored, my current interest being a point VDW raised very tentatively - the issue of dead weight. Those familiar with his work will recall VDW wrote (item 49 of "The Golden Years"):
"Weight is a great leveller, but my personal view is that there is a distinction between dead and live weight. Although I do not wish to press the issue, I feel excess lead in the saddle is more of a brake than a heavier jockey".
A selection by a colleague of mine on a private forum interested me in this regard - he excluded Qianshan Leader as a possible winner of the 3.20 Doncaster on Saturday on the ground that the 24f of the race was the wrong trip. (The horse had run twice over the trip and failed to be competitive on either occasion.) In the event QL won, so despite not analysing NH races I had a look at its career via the Racing Post website. What was helpful was that the same jockey had ridden the horse on all three 24f runs, so in all probability the "live" weight was much the same on each occasion. On the two down-the-field runs, QL had carried 11.12, on Saturday 10.02. Thus on the previous two occasions in all probability 24lb more dead weight than on Saturday.
VDW also commented (also in item 49) that "... the majority of horses falter when shouldering above a certain weight even though it may be in direct handicap proportion". QL had won with 11.12 over a shorter trip, so the weight per se seems unlikely to have been the problem, and I am wondering whether there is something in this dead weight issue.
My colleague, being a resourceful chap, emailed the trainer, Emma Lavelle, and received a helpful reply from her website manager, suggesting that Ms Lavelle saw three factors as relevant - the fact that QL had had a couple of runs, the weight and the going. He further consulted a former apprentice jockey, who was inclined to dismiss the idea that dead weight had any more significance than live weight, though he added that one or two of the trainers he had ridden for thought it had and on occasion sought to engage a heavier jockey rather than a lighter one who would have to carry more dead weight. Difficult to see how to reach a firm view on the issue, but it could help explain a turf result that interests me from last Spring, Doctor Parkes' win at Chester on 4 May.
Interest in matters VDW on the public forums I visit continues in a fairly spasmodic way, though sadly the Yuku-based one I used to administer has been closed down by its current proprietor, not for lack of contributors but because he felt uncomfortable about some of the posts. Things came to a head when a chap posted an obscene tirade in my direction - not the sort of thing one expects on a public forum. This, I guess, is what happens when someone of clearly limited vocabulary is unable to deal with the frustration we probably all find in trying to get to grips with VDW's work, and with the envy that develops when he observes others who have made more progress than himself. A sort of web forum equivalent of a yob keying someone's better car. Sad, but water under the bridge.
