Breeders Cup countdown: `Speed figures are the way, the truth, and the light. And my method is without equal' David Ashforth speaks to Andy Beyer, the legendary ratings compiler whose name is synonymous with speed figures in the US.

Byline: David Ashforth

Beyer is to speed figures what Betfair is to betting exchanges, and Sellotape, Hoover and Biro once were to sticky tape, vacuum cleaners and ballpoint pens; so dominant in their field that their brand name came to stand for the product itself.

Not many men can claim to have changed the face of racing, but Andy Beyer (pronounced buyer) has. A striking, heavily moustached, gravel-voiced man, Beyer has strong opinions, strongly expressed. His confidence stems from years of painstaking study, followed by years of proven success.

Always worth listening to, Beyer, racing correspondent of the Washington Post since 1978, has made punting pay. In North America, Beyer's speed figures are king, their rule so well established that horseplayers simply refer to `a Beyer'.

A Beyer is a figure that assigns a numerical value to how fast a horse has actually run in a particular race. If it sounds easy, it isn't. If it sounds commonplace, that is because Beyer made it so.

The son of a professor, Beyer went to Harvard University but missed his final exams - he claims it was because they clashed with the 1966 Belmont. Analysing horseraces is an intellectual challenge, and Beyer took it up with a dedication beyond the border with obsession.

"When I started out," he says, "the prevailing orthodoxy was that the time of races didn't matter, the true measure of a horse's ability was class and people who used speed figures were crackpots."

The crackpots were a tiny minority, and their speed figures were flawed. Beyer spent days, nights, weeks, months and years surrounded by copies of the Daily Racing Form and bottles of Jack Daniel's, poring over results, calculating par times and track variants and developing methods for comparing times at different distances and at different tracks. He emerged with a speed ratings system far superior to any other in North America.

"So few people were doing figures," he recalls. "I had a magic code." And Beyer put it to good use. In 1970, when the Washington Daily News gave him a horseracing column, he used it to tell his readers that Sun In Action, running at Liberty Bell on December 9, was "the betting opportunity of the year". Sun In Action won at more than 20-1, and Beyer studied even harder.

In 1972, his evolving speed figures quickly identified Secretariat's unique ability. In his third race as a two-year-old, the future Triple Crown winner recorded a figure of 120, the highest Beyer had seen for a juvenile. In the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, Secretariat ran to 129. In the Belmont, Beyer's system enabled him to measure just how great the champion's extraordinary, 31-length victory was. It represented a figure of 148.

A man with infectious enthusiasm, Beyer loved gambling, and loved writing. In 1975, he put the results of his work into the public arena, in Picking Winners, a breakthrough book that, for those punters prepared to grapple with its complexities, revealed a new way of handicapping.

Beyer wrote: "If a man is looking for easy money, he is horribly misdirected if he looks for it at the racetrack." There was no easy money, but there was a way of outsmarting virtually every other pari-mutuel player. "Speed figures are the way, the truth, and the light. And my method of speed handicapping is, I believe, without equal."

Beyer is not a braggart but he knew what he had. It took a long time for others to realise.

"The book sold well but not spectacularly," he says. "It found its audience, a hardcore of readers who wanted to learn. Serious horseplayers took it on board but until about 15 years ago the concept was still alien to most owners, trainers and breeders."

Beyer carried on making it pay. In 1977 he made $50,000, started to concentrate on exotic bets, did even better, and in 1981 made over $50,000 at Saratoga's four-week summer meeting. In 1990, he hit the Twin Trifecta at Laurel for his biggest success, $195,000, and repeated the feat the year after, for a payout of $134,000.

The turning point came in 1992, when the Daily Racing Form introduced Beyer's speed figures into its past performances. What its inventor calls "the most formidable handicapping tool ever devised" was fed to Stateside horseplayers. In 1993, Beyer On Speed was published. As a result, pari-mutuel dividends on Beyer's top-rated horses shrank.

Previously, it had been possible to overcome the 17 per cent takeout from the win pool and still make a profit by blindly backing the horse with the best Beyer in its previous run. That was no longer possible, although the figures remained a powerful predictive tool.

"I am still wedded intellectually to my figures," says Beyer, "but a horse with a clearly superior figure off its last race is now almost always heavily bet, so you have to look beyond the obvious standout figure."

The changing market prompted Beyer to incorporate the more subjective approach of `trip handicapping', an approach more familiar to European punters; analysing the shape and pace of races, changing track biases and the `trips' horses experienced in a race. It involved watching races.

But not turf races. "Speed figures are uniquely effective in American dirt racing," says Beyer. "In our dirt races there is always a pretty fast pace. It is very rare for the final time of a race to be distorted by a ridiculously slow early pace, but in grass racing, where the ability to accelerate in the final stages is tremendously important, that happens all the time." Beyer deals with dirt.

And European punters facing the dirt at Santa Anita on Breeders' Cup day should heed Beyer's advice.

"The nature of Californian racing is different from the rest of the world," he says. "It is much more speed oriented than anywhere else on earth, so horses racing on the dirt had better have at least a good measure of tactical speed to stay within striking distance.

"Unless there is extreme pace, horses don't come from way behind to win."