WHAT PRINCIPLE?

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 2, 2 July 1938, Page 25

WHAT PRINCIPLE?

ENIGMA IN HANDICAPPING

If one were asked casually whether Second Innings or Jazz Boj' had the better record, one would rep*./ almost without hesitation that Second Innings had. Yet in the Woburn Handicap at Trentham on Tuesday Jazz Boy has 10.2 to carry and Second Innings only 9.3.

When the records of the pair are searched it is found that Jazz Boy has won five races in 16 starts for stakes worth £390 in wins, and Second Innings has won the same number of races in only six starts for £393 in wins. It was only a piece of bad luck, too, that Second Innings did not also win the time he failed, at Rangiora in the spring. Jazz Boy's wins have all been at Hawke's Bay meetings, but Second Innings scored twice at Dunedin.

It may of course be possible to justify the difference in weights on the handicaps that have from time to time been awarded these two horses. But would not such very justification in itself, with the respective records set down alongside the weights, seem clearly to point out that the handicapping of horses in the Dominion at present is based on no common understanding whatever of what the true principles of weight-assessment, as applied in England, Australia, and other countries, are? Mr. Coyle has mainly taken Jazz Boy to his latest mark; but he has not previously had Second Innings to handicap and he has had to try and find a line to him through other handicapping.