Equibase adds gate-to-wire times to official charts
Equibase has begun adding the full gate-to-wire times of races to its official charts, the company announced on Thursday.
The gate-to-wire times include the run-up, which is an often widely varying distance that horses must reach after breaking from the gate before the official time of the race starts. Some horseplayers have been highly critical of the U.S. custom of using a run-up, which, depending on track configuration and surface, can vary between a few dozen feet to nearly a furlong in some rare cases.
The gate-to-wire times will not replace the fractional and official times already listed in the charts but are being provided as a service to those horseplayers who have expressed a desire to have the full times.
“A lot of this grew out of the panel discussion [at the University of Arizona Symposium] last year, where we had some people saying, ‘Just publish them,’” said Kyle McDoniel, the president of Equibase. “And so we said, ‘Why not?’ There’s nothing to lose here.”
The gate-to-wire times will be produced by Equibase chartcallers already hand-timing the races as a redundancy to Equibase’s automated GPS- and beam-based timing systems. The times will be published on the charts next to the officials fractional and official times.
In the past several years, Equibase has been allowing customers to request raw data from its database, but the gate-to-wire data field will not immediately available in those batched data files.
“We’ll be working on that and expect it to be available soon,” McDoniel said.
Most tracks use run-ups to minimize wear-and-tear on turf courses and to optimize conditions for the break due to the track’s physical configuration. Equibase has provided the run-up distance on its charts since 2009, after beginning to collect the data late in 2008.
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