Off to the races
I'm a sucker for the Humboldt County Fair horse races at Ferndale. Every year, I set aside the time, get reserved box seats and have a ball during the 10 day meet. Like everything else in life, technology has affected the races.
Let's start with the parimutuel betting ... in the old days before off track betting, the odds were determined by who was physically present betting at the racetrack on the day of the race. Now, off track betting means the complex formulas that determine the final payout odds are calculated from thousands of bets from hundreds of venues around the US. Of course, the whole purpose of parimutuel betting is to ensure that the house will always win.
Then there is a the business of horse training, medication and equipment. If you saw the movie Sea Biscuit, you saw rather simple starting gates, saddles, horse gear and liniment. Today, these things are engineered especially for the task at hand, with light weight and durability as prime deliverables. And that doesn't count the diuretics, hormones and other drugs that are used in horse racing.
Finally, there is the betting itself. What used to be a time consuming process of placing a bet at the window is now a self-serve transaction at a touch screen kiosk.
I had an odd thing happen at the races on Friday when I placed bets on races 1, 2 and 3 just before the 1st race went off. The tickets for the first race printed OK, but the foggy weather jammed the roll of print paper so the tickets for races 2 and 3, and my final cash voucher were over-printed into one black blob of ink.
In the old days I suppose this wouldn't have happened because you would have had your tickets and change before you left the betting window. Today, they were able to reconstruct my bets based upon the number of the transaction that appeared on one of the tickets that printed. Even if the ticket had not printed, they could have reconstructed the bets based upon the machine number that left an audit trail of the entire transaction.
I simply gave the attendant my box number, watched the 1st race, and she showed up with my reprinted tickets before the 2nd post.
The sport of kings still requires skill, courageous horses, vigilant training and luck. But the wheels are greased with high tech.
I'll see you at Ferndale !!
Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com