Are Sim Horses Getting Faster?

Last summer, I wrote the Speed Study Series, which was an effort to compare horses from the past with horses from the present, in regards to speed figures.  It ended up being a very interesting look at some of the old greats, such as Storm Dog and Joe Cayenne, especially in relation to newer greats such as Horseshoe Bay.  However, in the past year, an interesting, and perhaps frightening, trend has begun to arise.  Those all-time greats of yesteryear are starting to become an afterthought, from the statistical side of the sim.  The records that these greats from the early years held are beginning to fall, and fall fast.  The scariest part of this is that those horses that were once see as the elite, the ultimate in greatness, are now beginning to be seen in a different light.

No one is denying the greatness of these Sim Hall of Famers.  In fact, no person in the sim is actually beginning to think of these Hall of Famers any differently.  However, stats and records are.  What is this alarming trend that has popped up recently, you ask?

Sim horses are getting faster.

Maybe this seems obvious to some of you.  “Of course horses are going to get faster”, you say.  Really?  Why should this be so?  In the real world, it’s certainly possible that this is true.  New technologies are always being discovered, horses are being bred towards speed, and every day we become more knowledgeable about many issues.  So it would make sense that horses get faster.

And yet, Secretariat’s Belmont time has not even been approached in the last 35 years.  Look around at all the tracks, and there are plenty of records set long ago.  So while horses in the real world might be getting faster, many of the old time records still stand.

The sim, however, is computerized.  There is no advanced technology (other than what people use to access the sim).  And the code is set.  Computers cannot do random like the real world can.  There are parameters that it must follow.  Which is why this recent trend has become somewhat worrisome.

I have no proof as to whether or not all sim horses are getting faster.  That is far too much data for my computer to handle, or for me to get a copy of.  The average horse may be staying the same.  In fact, the average horse may be getting slower.  But one thing is for sure; there appears to be the beginning of a trend that elite horses are becoming more elite.

On Week 3308, a week in which 31 Graded stakes were carded by the computer, 14 had records set by newcomers.  Famous horses such as Kristeene S. and Tuff Enuff saw their records fall.  Similarly, stakes records that have held on since 1999 or 2000 have been falling in recent weeks.

Of course, this does not prove anything.  As the saying goes, records were made to be broken.  Stakes Records are broken every week in the sim.  This doesn’t really prove that horses are getting any faster.  A statistical analysis that I am about to reveal, however, does point to a statistical improbability in the recent record-setting pace, and this seems to suggest that horses may, in fact, be getting faster.

Note: The next part of this article is very statistical in nature.  If you do not care about the statistics, feel free to skip down below the line.

To begin the statistical analysis, it is important that I lay out what I am actually analyzing.  The following data is from the Graded Stakes Record list that I have been keeping since the end of the Speed Study Series in 2006.  There are 635 Graded Stakes races on the list, of which 634 are included in this survey (one is rejected because there is debate over who holds the record and what year it was set).

Here in Table 1 is the number of Graded Stakes records set in each year, as of 9/14/07 (Week 3336 is the last included).

Yes, it looks like we peaked in 2003, and have been slowly declining since.  This year, however, there have been 91 records set.  There are still 3 months remaining.

Some will argue that 2003’s pace put it at a higher pace than our current one.  Yes, it is true.  There were 99 records set through the week of 9/1 in 2003.  The 91 we have this year is fewer than that.  And this thought is what originally threw me.  I planned on writing this column over a month ago.  When I did the calculations though, I realized that we were actually slower than we were in 2003.  I did not, however, do all of the calculations.

After another week of changing a large portion of stakes records (in Week 3336, nearly 40% of stakes records were broken), I had another look at the numbers.  This time, I broke the stakes records down into 3-month periods.  Although yearly numbers may show one thing, breaking it down further better shows the trend.

The statistics show that 56 of the 91 records set this year, a staggering 61.5%, were set between June and August.  Meanwhile, only 31% of the Graded Stakes races have occurred.  The number even trumps 2000, when 11 of the 24 records were set within this period.  That’s 45.83%.  Here is a chart for the records set from the period of 6/9 to 9/1 for each year.

That’s not all.  For those of you who are statistically inclined, the average number of records set in this 3 month period is 21.56 records.  The standard deviation is 15.98.

For those who are not statistically inclined and have found your way into this section anyway, here’s what these stats mean.  There is a 95% chance that the number of records set in this 3 month period falls somewhere between 0 and 53.5.  Notice that 56 does not fall within this range.  That means the odds of 56 records being set were less than 5 percent.  In the statistical world, that’s enough to say that the sample is not valid.  However, in this case, we are not looking at a sample.  We are looking at the entire population.

This is the first, and only, year in which the number of records set does not fall within the 95% confidence interval (that is, we are 95% confident that the number of graded stakes records falls within a certain range) for any of the four 3 month periods.

Of course, this is not definitive proof that sim horses are getting faster.  First of all, this only looks at graded stakes horses, and not sim horses in general.  In fact, the idea that sim horses are getting faster is misleading.  In reality, the statement should be that elite horses are becoming more elite.

For those of you who skipped the above part, here is the brief synopsis.  The elite sim horses are getting faster.  Records are getting set at a pace higher than is statistically probable.  And they are getting set at record levels.

In fact, over the last 5 weeks, records have been set in 43.75%, 33.33%, 45.45%, 25%, and 38.46% of graded stakes.  You don’t have to be a statistician to realize how high these numbers are.  The sim has been going for 9 years.  What are the odds that 1 year would see so many graded stakes records each week, for that many weeks in a row?  One or two per week are expected.  When 14 records fall in 1 week, a red flag gets thrown up.  When there are 11 races, and 5 have new records, red flags get thrown up.

Do we have a special group of horses coming up?  Maybe.  It’s certainly possible that there is a new class in the sim, and that it just so happens that the best of the best are running in, and winning, these races.  It’s also possible that the records were not very strong, and the fields have just been weak in the past.

However, some great names have fallen.  Enough Knock, Western Groom, and Storm Dog have all lost records recently.  And it is not merely one or two horses setting these records.  Of the 91 records set so far this year, they have been set by 83 different horses.  No horse has set more than 2 records this year, with the exception of Ermington Pegusus, who is bound for the Hall of Fame.  Furthermore, 20 of the 91 records have been set in Grade 1 races.  While 2002, 2003, and 2004 have all seen more Grade 1 records fall, there are still 3 months left in 2007.  All it will take is 5 more of these records for 2007 to have the highest amount.  And based on the pace we have been seeing lately, that should happen sooner rather than later.

So, as you’re looking at your new two-year-olds, start asking yourself if they have what it takes.  Because it seems as though “what it takes” may be a little more than it used to be.