Sacred's 'real' time very fast but no record(3 Apr)

MARK YOUR CARD by MURRAY BELL

The new course record time established by Sacred Kingdom at Sha Tin underlines the significant effect of wind and atmospheric conditions on race results.

Sacred Kingdom not only lowered the seven -year-old record that was formerly held by the Ivan Allan-trained Tajasur, he absolutely smashed it, taking a half second off the old mark in posting 54.7 seconds.

Sacred Kingdom doesn't need any more hyping. He has won four from four and trainer Ricky Yiu Poon-fie is calling him the equal of the great Fairy King Prawn at the same stage.

The punters are sufficiently carried away with his prodigious ability to send him out a $1.35 favourite on his return to racing after a 70-day break and he didn't let them down.

But let's have a reality check here. Firstly, runner-up Friendly Gains carried six pounds more than Sacred Kingdom and has run the boom three-year-old to a length. On many traditional rating systems, that makes his performance superior.

Secondly, if Sacred Kingdom has taken half a second off the course record, Friendly Gains has taken 0.35 seconds off it as well, remembering that six lengths at this distance will be covered in approximately 0.9 seconds.

Third placed Blue Genes, beaten by 3 1/2 lengths, has gone close to equalling Tajasur's old benchmark too.

Denying times is fraught with danger but the one length margin here in favour of Sacred Kingdom is simply at odds with the winning time in terms of true racing merit.

So how fast is 54.7 seconds in relative terms for a Class One race? After mathematically factoring out the speed of the track on the day, it's 1.15 seconds faster than standard for this grade. Everyone at the Sha Tin track on Saturday knew there was a prevailing southerly wind, which was right behind the sprinters as they charged down the outside section of the straight track.

In human athletics, such a record would not be recognised because of the wind assistance. But Tajasur's win was apparently achieved the same way back in 2000, with a significant tail wind.

Using alternative analytical techniques, we have determined that the contribution of the tail wind was 0.75 seconds. That means Sacred Kingdom's "real" time was 55.45 - very fast, very decent, but not a record.

It was, however, 0.4 seconds faster than Class One standard.

By way of comparison, at Silent Witness's best, he ran 0.9 seconds better than Group-race standard in the 2005 Bauhinia Sprint Trophy.