Equibase race caller Curtis Treece checks his charts in the Press Box at Del Mar. © Benoit Photo
It’s a Tuesday morning in late November and you have the day off. Not much is going on. You do a few chores around the house, maybe run up to the store for a few groceries but by 11 a.m. your day is free to do whatever you want. Being a horse player, you decide to check out what’s running and find a little racetrack in New Mexico called Zia Park.
Now you’re an experienced horse player who loves to crunch the numbers and you need more than just the connection and breeding information provided by the program offered on your advance-deposit wagering account. You want past performances.
So, with a few taps on your phone or clicks on the mouse, you get the past performances of every horse running that day at Zia Park. No need to drive to the liquor store to buy The Daily Racing Form, which may or may not have Zia Park in it. You get the information you want without leaving the house.
It’s one of the many marvels of the modern computer age. You can find, almost instantaneously, how, where and when a horse ran his last race. What the conditions were that day or what kind of surface he ran on. The vital tools used by most horse players world-wide.
The curator of this valuable information is a company called Equibase. It has been collecting data on every race run at an officially sanctioned racetrack in North America since 1991 and has detailed start information that dates back to 1976. And you can access it in less time than it takes to make a bet.
Beginning in the late 1800s, The Daily Racing Form was the official record keeper for the sport. But when Walter Annenberg, whose father had purchased the publication back in 1922, sold the company to Rupert Murdoch who, in turn, sold it again a couple years later, many racing industry leaders became nervous about the security and preservation of all these records.
“It dawned on racing’s leaders that they (the DRF) could decide to cease publication tomorrow and the industry wouldn’t have any data,” says Rhonda Norby, the director of marketing and communications at Equibase. “Equibase was born out of a need and desire for the industry to own its racing information and statistics. I’m biased, of course, but I feel that’s probably been one of the best success stories of racing industry collaboration.”
Equibase was formed in 1990 and they called their first race on January 1, 1991. For several years, The Daily Racing Form and Equibase chart callers worked side by side at racetracks around the country. But in 1998 the Daily Racing Form decided to cease data collection and Equibase became the sole record keeper for Thoroughbred racing.
Equibase is based in Lexington, Kentucky but they have track and field personnel at most every racetrack. The process of compiling all of the information begins at the track.
“As an example, Del Mar writes a condition book and when those races are carded, each day’s entry files are sent to Equibase,” Norby explains. “We will process those, couple the past performance information and send it back to the track for them to produce their programs.”
That information is sent to all downstream customers, including The Daily Racing Form. It’s for them to print their Forms and for the tracks to print their programs. No matter where you get the handicapping products you see online, they all start with Equibase.
“Once the races are run,” Norby notes, “then Equibase creates the official chart of the race which turns into the past performance line. That is coupled next time the tracks put together an entry file, so it comes full circle.”
“It’s a lot of data,” says Del Mar’s chart caller Ken Davis. “You have to be very detail oriented.”
Davis has been putting together charts in one form or another since 1977. He worked out of The Daily Racing Form’s Los Angeles offices for 28 years, receiving chart information from the track and field personnel.
“Our office was in Koreatown,” Davis recalls, “and when the Rodney King riots broke out in 1992 they were burning down the businesses in the neighborhood. We couldn’t put out our Kentucky Derby edition. It was Thursday before the Derby and there was smoke everywhere and we were evacuated. Our building was okay but they had armed security on the roof. That was May of ’92 and by early ’93 they decided to move (the operations) to Phoenix.”
Davis, his wife and son made the move and lived in Arizona from 1993 to 2000. In late 1998, Steve Crist bought The Daily Racing Form and, being a New York guy, he moved the headquarters out of Phoenix and east to New York City.
“I was one the few asked to go back to New York,” Davis recalls. “I did that for five years and then Crist had made his money and he sold the company. They came to me and asked if I was interested in a buyout. It was 20 degrees outside and I said ‘Okay.’”
That was in 2005. He returned to the West Coast and did some clocking at Hollywood Park and landed the Equibase job in ’07. The summer of ’08 was his first year at Del Mar.
“When I started you had to type in all of the results,” Davis says. “Now they just click a button.”
Davis is being modest. It’s not that easy.
Equibase chart caller Curtis Treece eyes runners on the track during a race and relays position information to Equibase chart taker Ken Davis in the Del Mar Press Box. © Benoit Photo
During a race, Davis works with chart caller Curtis Treece putting together the race chart in their booth in the Press Box overlooking the track. Unlike Trevor Denman or Larry Collmus, Treece – who began working for Equibase in 2004 -- calls the race by numbers followed by the margin at each point of call. For instance, he might say “three by one-and-a-half” then “four by a half” in rapid sequence as he calls out every horse in the race.
“Say in a six-furlong race we have a start call coming out of the gate,” Davis explains. “Then after a quarter of a mile he does his first call with margins. Then after a half mile he does his second call with margins and then, at the green and white eighth pole, the stretch call, and he calls margins again. If it’s a 12-horse race, Curtis has to call 12 horses at each point of call.”
While Treece is calling the race, Davis is writing the information down on a worksheet and then after the race he inputs the numbers into the computer. Meanwhile, Treece turns to the bank of television monitors behind him and reviews the replays.
“He makes use of the pan shot and the head-on shot,” Davis says, “and he loves the drone shot. He will adjust margins from what he called during the race. He’ll look at the pan shot and go ‘That looks more like a half-length rather than a length.’ That’s how we come up with the final margins.”
They don’t have to do the finish. The folks in the photo-finish booth call down with those margins, which Davis inputs with the others.
“I’m responsible for putting in the purse money which I do ahead of time,” Davis adds. “Then I click a button and all of the pari-mutuel information comes in.”
That would be the payoffs for all of the wagers, from a win ticket to the superfecta. If it’s a claiming race, Davis has to enter that information, too.
“There could be five claims in a race,” Davis notes, “and I’m getting calls from the stewards and others giving me the name of the horse, the new owner, the new trainer and the number of claims in for the horse. If there are five owners we’re expected to put in all five owners’ names. That’s a big part of the summer meet just keeping up on the claims.”
And those short comments you see on the far right of a past performance line, that’s Curtis Treece.
“You have to try to say something in a limited space,” Davis notes. “You want to give the readers something they can sink their teeth into. ‘Pulled, lost path’ that means the horse was kind of rank and wasn’t cooperating. He tries to get as much in that limited space as he can to describe what happened in the race.”
Davis also inputs the equipment information (blinkers, for instance) on each horse which he gathers during the post parade. All of it has to be done by the time the horses go through their warmups for the next race.
“Sometimes when we have these 12-horse turf races, we’re still working on stuff when they’re going into the gate for the next race,” Davis notes. “We can get a little bit behind, but because the dirt race (which typically follows a turf race) generally doesn’t have as big of a field we can catch up on the next race.”
There are a lot of moving parts so what could possibly go wrong?
“A year ago, it (the tote information program) wasn’t working at all and I was five races behind putting in the tote information. Nobody was getting the charts.”
Fortunately, that’s not very often and the process goes off without a hitch many more times than not over the course of a racing day. Once everything is there and the charts are complete, Davis sends it to Equibase.
“I have a validate button,” Davis says. “I click it and it goes to Equibase and goes online right away. I found that amazing at first. You used to have to wait until the next day when the next Racing Form was published. We kind of take it for granted now.”
One would imagine Equibase’s computer center, with its data on every horse race run in the past 48 years, would consist of banks of computers the size of closets, side-by-side, filling several rooms.
“You would be so shocked,” Norby says of Equibase’s technology center in Lexington. “It’s on the third floor of the building. People come and tour the building and when they get up on the third floor they find a small row of machines. The entire database of the industry is housed there. Technology has evolved that has allowed us to store information on smaller machines.”
They have redundancy centers at various other locations as a back-up in case something catastrophic happens.
“Chuck Scaravelli was our former vice president of track and field,” Norby states. “He would oversee all the data collection. He used to tell the story that the goal was to have everything input into the computer and have it ready by the time that horse would run back. The most often horses run back typically is in two weeks, often longer than that.
“Fast forward to today,” Norby continues. “We collect the data and the chart is up and out and available, typically 30 minutes after the race is run with the exception of the Kentucky Derby."
As for the always valuable ‘clicks,’ Norby says Equibase.com averages two million pageviews a day.
“The thing that I’m most proud of is the free information we have been able to make available to the industry and race fans,” Norby says, “including leaders’ lists and individual statistical profile pages. That was a matter of taking the treasure trove of information in the database and collating it in a way that it can be useful. Those projects came at a high development cost but it’s worth it because that’s been part of Equibase’s founding mission: to promote the sport by making data as widely available as possible.”