With horse racing temporarily abandoned, followers of the sport may wish to use the time to brush up on the theory. A recent issue of Weather, the journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, provides an opportunity to do just that. It contains an analysis by Marie Sheridan and Dr John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth of that most elusive of racing concepts - the notion of "the going".
The "going" refers to the condition of the ground. It may be "heavy", when the soil is muddy and saturated with moisture, or it may be "firm" when the ground is hard and dry. In between lies a whole spectrum of different perceptions of the state of ground.
It may, for example, be "soft to heavy", "soft", "yielding to soft", "yielding", "good to yielding", or just plainly "good". "Good", as the name implies, is quite ideal; the slightly moist soil provides a perfect surface to suit the natural rhythm of the horse. But then as the ground dries out further, the going may become "good to firm" or "firm", the latter condition being a little on the hard side, and not suited at all to animals of a delicate physique.
There are "horses for courses". Some cope well with heavy going, while others may be at a disadvantage; at the other extreme, firm going may be distressful or injurious. Either way, trainers like to have an assessment of the going before deciding whether to allow their animal to run or not.
The clerk of the course declares on the morning of a meeting what he thinks the going is. His decision, although founded on experience, is necessarily subjective, based in part on the distance to which a stick, jabbed into the ground at various points around the track, can penetrate the ground. Sheridan and Sweeney's aim is to provide an objective method of arriving at the going, based on the use of meteorological parameters.
The going is related to the characteristics of the local soil, and to the recent weather. Over a lengthy period, the authors have compared the officially declared going at a number of Irish racecourses with values of rainfall, temperature, wind speed, and sunshine from adjacent weather stations over the preceding week. By this means they have arrived at a predictive model to calculate the going.
The results are encouraging. It is hoped that the methodology can be refined to provide assessments of the going that are more timely and more accurate than those currently made available, just before the start of the day's racing, by the clerk of the course and his trusty, thrusting stick.