Season 20: Age Change
The Age Change process normally takes place at or just after midnight at the changeover from season to season.
On this occasion (1st December 2007) the Age Change did not complete until around 02:40. Horses that were set to Auto-Train were trained prior to this process and as such were trained at their previous age and therefore their owners were unable to determine the effects of the Age Change on these horses until the next day.
Throughout this delayed Age Change disinformation as to the underlying cause was supplied to owners. Eventually it was admitted that a preparatory upload for Rated Racing had taken place and that this was the main cause for the delay in the Age Change process.
Season 20: The race that never was
The majority of races run with no problems whatsoever but on 27th December 2007 there was a very strange occurrence indeed.
The G2 WFA race scheduled to go off at 19:13 was watched 'live' on the official Raceviewer by a number of owners with horses in the race. Imagine the surprise when these owners subsequently saw the 'official' result of this race which showed a completely different finishing order to that shown on the Raceviewer!
A problem obviously existed as the jockey allocations on the 'official' result clearly indicated that the result was flawed.
Following initial denials that anything was amiss (and the race mysteriously disappearing from the Raceviewer archives) it was eventually admitted that the 'official' jockey allocations were in error but that the 'official' finishing order was correct.
Owners of horse that should have received prize-monies from the race shown on the Raceviewer remained unhappy however and continued to lobby on this matter.
Eventually after nearly a month the powers that be finally decided to do the right thing and paid out the prize-monies to those horses in 'the race that never was'.
Season 20: Grading
As each new horse is trained past a fitness of 90% it receives a grade (G1 or G2) which inherently indicates its supposed sphere of ability.
Following the problems with the delayed Age Change owners started to notice that a number of horses graded as lower quality (G2) animals were producing training results which were in excess of those attained by top G2s of the previous generation.
Despite repeated concerns from owners it was stated that there had been no changes made to the Grading process and that all horses were indeed correctly graded. Eventually this position was reversed when it came to light that the preparatory upload which had adversely affected the Age Change had erroneously uploaded the Grading system from the internal Test site and that this internale Test system operated a different Grading system to that of the Live system.
As a consequence a number of races were run over the next few days which contained incorrectly graded horses, causing the majority of runners in these races to be at a fairly large disadvantage as they were effectively racing against horses of the peer group above theirs.
Over the next 2 or 3 days various horses were regraded (sometimes more than once) in an attempt to correctly grade each horse. It is unknown how successful or not this was but there are still the odd horse on site that would indicate it was not a complete success (ref: Monsun).
Season 20: Allowance Weights
Whilst the majority of Stakes Racing works on the basis of additional weight penalties based on performance there is one aspect of Stakes Racing that works on an inverse system whereby weight allowances are granted based on lack of performance. These races are imaginatively called Allowance races.
Season 20 saw a new innovative development introduced called Rated Racing. This was declared to be a seperate racing arena and totally independent of Stakes Racing with neither racing arena affecting the other in any way.
Unfortunately it was noticed by owners on the sister site and later confirmed by owners on our site that this was not the case and that Rated Racing results were being incorporated into the equation used to determine the racing weight for horses in Allowance races.
Initially this possibility was flatly denied but after some rigorous research an irrefutible case was put forward that clearly showed this to be true. Once admission was forthcoming the error was resolved and following repeated pressure from owners to provide compensation for affected races this was eventually forthcoming as well.