Ask Beyer: Tracing the origin of speed figures

Q. How did handicappers [of the past] handicap without speed figures? Did they just compare finish times, or what?

– Bradley Bollhagen

A. If you can find a copy of Toney Betts’s “Across the Board,” you can read an engaging history of gamblers and assorted racetrack characters from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Betts wrote that a handicapper named Colonel William James timed races by himself, hired an engineer to compute wind velocity and calculated his own track variants. He won a fortune at Belmont Park, Betts said, but “lost it on the Floozies of Broadway.” The most famous gamblers of the 1940s were Jules Fink and a syndicate known as the Speed Boys, who made fractional times a centerpiece of their handicapping approach.

So speed handicapping is nothing new. When I was getting interested in the game in the late 1960s, racing magazines regularly published speed charts that purported to show how to compare times at different distances. The Daily Racing Form and Morning Telegraph published, in their past performances, a speed rating and track variant (which survive until this day). But the calculation of most published speed ratings was grossly flawed. This was about to change. Len Ragozin developed a sophisticated speed-handicapping method for his publication, “The Sheets.”

My book “Picking Winners,” published in 1975, explained the proper mathematics for comparing times at different distances and recommended an approach for calculating daily track variants. Speed figures in the computer age are surely more accurate than anything that old-time handicappers could have used, but the smart ones (like Colonel James) could prosper in an era when most other bettors were working with poor information.