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#1
4th January 2011, 11:59 AM
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Its a weighty issue
I just don’t get it. I find it hard to believe that weight is important when assessing a horses chances, within reason of course. Let’s consider two horses (Phatty & Skinny) both of similar ability (disregard the obvious if they’re both similar ability why aren’t they equally handicapped ?) and a race over 1600 mtrs where both are equal chances. Phatty has been been allocated 57 kgs and Skinny has been allocated 53 kgs. Now the first thing I suppose we would look at is the difference in weight of 4 kgs and try to figure out how that translates into an advantage or margin. I guess there would be a formulae for that. 4kgs is seen as a significant weight difference / advantage. Now let’s look at Phatty’s physical weight which is 520kgs, so Phatty has to lump 577kgs around 1600 metres. Skinny weighs 500kgs so Skinny has to lump 554kgs. 4kgs represents 0.69% of Phatty’s total weight and 4 kgs represents 0.72% of Skinny’s total weight, a difference between the two horses of 0.03%. How the heck can 0.03% difference in weight have any meaningful affect ? You could argue that this figure is counting the 4kgs twice?
Let’s further add that Phatty is carrying 52kgs of jockey and 5kgs of lead, but Skinny is carrying all the 53kgs in jockey weight. Do we take this into account? Remember that 4kgs is seen as a significant weight advantage. Further, Phatty usually races best when he’s around 505kgs and Skinny is only 5kgs off her best racing weight. So Phatty has got to lose 15kgs and Skinny 5kgs, that’s a difference of 10kgs. Does this count? Is a horses excess body weight as significantl as the difference of handicapped weight between two horses? Is 5kg of lead worse or better than 5kgs of jockey, I would think lead is worse, but how do you take that into account? So we have 4kg advantage to Skinny compared with Phatty, (plenty of times you can read that one horse has a huge weight advantage over another). Where does this 4kg sit in respect to physical weight, handicapped weight, lead weight, and overall weight carried by the horse? 
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