Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

LOL Bruce... which one of us is pushing 70?  Since the Indy 500 keeps track of 
how many laps each car has completed and all the spectators know that the car 
crossing the finish line at any given time isn't really finishing, I think it's 
safe to say the technology exists to track horses on a point to point ride.  We 
just need to decide which is more important, the old time feeling of a head to 
head race or giving every team a fair crack at the course.  If we staggered the 
start, that would raise questions.  What would be the best way to chose who went 
first? How would Ride Management know which horses were overtime and which 
weren't?  And plenty of others, I'm sure.  But that's the nature of progress. 
You overcome a known problem and up pop different ones to solve.  Hopefully each 
iteration gets you closer to whatever goal you have set.  I tend to favor 
fairness in man-made situations.  Laws, for instance, should be fair because we 
humans create them.  Weather, at least up until now, isn't fair or unfair.  It 
just is.  When the time comes that we can control it, then how we do that will 
fall into the fair or unfair purview.

Certainly there would be much more strategy to riding Tevis if the starts were 
staggered.  It would put more onus on the riders to keep track of their own real 
time and there'd be a greater need for some sort of way to let riders know how 
their real time compared with that of others.  I'm guessing that until a better 
method was devised, the starting order would use recent records of average race 
speeds to determine starting position with the faster horses first.  Since each 
horse would be competing against the clock, that wouldn't necessarily favor the 
faster horses but it would mean that there'd be fewer bottlenecks since the 
general tendency would be for the horse/rider teams to become more and more 
strung out as the faster horses moved further and further away from the slower 
ones.  Passing would be less of a problem.

We all know nothing is going to change for next year and probably not for the 
next 20 years, but they will eventually change.  I wish I could be around to see 
how it all turns out <wry grin>.

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