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Green Moon Win Out Of This World
We tipped Green Moon ($4.00) to win the Turnbull Stakes – but we still don’t know how he was able to do it. Horses just don’t travel three wide for the entire way in a Group 1 race over 2000 metres and win – not in Australia anyway.
So just how much additional ground did the Robert Hickmott trained 6 year old cover in winning the event? There are a couple of ways to calculate this. Firstly, if you’re a mathematician you could use a formula involving the circumference and radius of the Flemington track to work it out. However, despite coming top in mental arithmetic in my grade five class I am not really a mathematician – so I recommend a simpler method.
Many years ago a brainy bettor came up with the following formula to work out how much additional ground a horse caught out wide covered in the run -
’One length for every horse out from the fence for each 90 degree bend it travels’
Whilst the formula may sound like a bit of mumbo jumbo - we’ve tested it and it works. In fact, it is so accurate that it comes up with an almost identical figure a mathematician would come up with using circumference and radius measures.
If you look at the Flemington track you can see that a horse competing in a 2000 metre race travels around approximately two 90 degree turns. A horse caught out three wide according to our formula covers two additional lengths for each turn. 2 turns x 2 lengths per turn = 4 lengths extra ground compared to a horse which hugged the rails all the way.
So there we have it – Green Moon scored by a margin of only a long neck at the finish but actually covered 4 lengths of additional ground compared to Voila Ici which led on the rails and finished fourth in the race. It can pay to take note of horses like Green Moon which cover a tonne of extra ground in the run and figure in the finish as their performances are much better than they appear on paper - and they often run well at nice odds at their next starts.
After Green Moon's Turnbull victory jockey Craig Williams commented “He couldn’t get in – it was really special that win”. We couldn’t agree more. Green Moon is set to take on Pierro in the Cox Plate at his next race outing and if he runs up to his amazing Turnbull effort he could very well test the star 3 year old.
Aussieraces.com October 2012
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