Okay, here’s my blog post about my experience with “thoroughbred racing records”:
So, I’ve been diving deep into this whole thoroughbred racing records thing lately. It started kind of simple, but man, did it get complicated fast!
Getting Started
I started by just wanting to know the fastest horse ever, you know? Like, the basic stuff. I figured it would be a quick Google search and I’d have my answer. Boy, was I wrong.
I found some names, some times, but then I realized there were all these different distances, different tracks, different surfaces… it was a mess! I quickly realized it will going to take some work to make sense of.
Building My Own Database (Sort Of)
Then I decided, “Screw it, I’m going to make my own little database.” I’m no programmer, so I just used a spreadsheet. Yeah, a spreadsheet. Don’t judge!
I started by listing all the major races I could think of – Kentucky Derby, Preakness, Belmont Stakes, Breeders’ Cup Classic, and a bunch more from around the world. Then, I added columns for the horse’s name, the year, the time, the track, and the distance. I did this all by myself.
- Column 1: Race Name
- Column 2: Horse Name
- Column 3: Year
- Column 4: Time
- Column 5: Track
- Column 6: Distance
The Data Struggle is Real
Getting all this data was a pain! I spent hours digging through websites, old articles, and even some dusty old books I found at a used bookstore. I will never do that again. I copied and pasted, typed stuff in manually… it took forever. And I’m pretty sure I made some mistakes along the way, but hey, I’m only human.
Results and Some Surprises
After all that work, I finally had something resembling a database. It’s not perfect, but it’s mine. I do not want to see another spreadsheet. I could finally start to see some patterns and answer some of my own questions.
I will never try something like this again, but I am happy with the simple results I got.
