How long's a length?
 

This should turn up a few variations. The average of the answers will probably be close to the mark.

When developing systems I've always used 2.4m (roughly 8 feet). What about you?

Anybody know the official distance?

Men do tend to exaggerate.

I went through this painful exercise before.

Once you think about it and look at enough official photos - which now are actually a composite of ~2,000 per second slits of the finishing post, it appears that a length is actually a fraction of a second.

That's the only thing that makes sense. Your beaten margin (hence position) is not determined by how far away you were from the winner when it nosed over the line, but by how many seconds after the winner your nose arrives.

The standard 6 Lengths = 1 second appears the closest.

JFC

That's an interesting twist. Let me ponder on it.

Pixie

Not to confuse the issue further, but using that as a benchmark is fine and fairly accurate when measuring the distance between horses in the same race.
When you start to hypothesize about one race being 6 lengths better than the other, is when it all comes unravelled.

Every week the commentators ramble on about this winner being a second or half a second quicker than the previous. The only problem with that theory is that they ran at quite a different pace.

Invariably to upset the applecart further, you can back the odds on favourite next time because it had the quickest time of the day, and be left wondering why it struggled to run a place, while the horse that ran a slower time comes out and blitzes the field at 3/1.

You'd be a very rich man if you layed the horse with the fastest race time next time out.

Personally, I believe coming to terms with 'Pace' and understanding it on a whole of race basis, concerning an individual runner's pace requirements, is one of the last frontiers ventured into by most punters. It's also the most profitable area for deciding when a horse is likely to win and when it won't.

If a punter doesn't don't know what pace a race is going to be run at and even worse, what type of pace suits their race selection, that punter is relying on little more than favorable luck [regardless of other form study] in trying to make a quid from a race's outcome.

Agreed Crash,

To be honest, that's something I've never been able to master.

Assessing speed maps or likely pace isn't too difficult, if you have the time, but assessing pace in past races has always proved difficult for me.

Difficult for me too quite often !

With 2000th/second accuracy you wonder why margins are still published in terms of distance.

So should punters bother considering the beaten margin in their analysis of a candidate selections form? Or does it depend on what the margin was and the state and geometry of the track?

Maybe I'll pick up one of those US books on speed and pace...

AngryPixie,

Those books are a good read in terms of interpretation and application of the figures, however, be aware that it is almost wholly geared toward US dirt track racing which does not translate well to Aussie Turf.

The racing patterns are quite different as are the times a horse can run on turf and dirt.

As an example there are a few pacing races run on grass here each year, the race times are nowhere near the times on crushed shell grit tracks.