The Winning Horse
I went to Raj’s house for a sleepover as his parents were away. I was in a deep sleep and woke up suddenly when I heard the doorbell. My watch showed me the time as 5 am. I got up and went to the main door to check on the intruder at this hour. When I looked into the eyepiece on the main entrance, I realised that an older man with a handbag was standing at the door. With my hazy eyes and opened the door. To my surprise, it was Ramalingam from Yercaud. Raj and I had met him in Yercaud a month earlier. Yercaud is a small hill town twenty miles from Salem, known for Shevroy’s peak and the beautiful lake.
Ramalingam was a bald man with a short build, always dressed in white clothes — a dhoti and a shirt. He smiled at me with a surprise as he walked into the house. He settled in a chair in the living room and looked tired after the train journey. Without hesitation, he asked me for a cup of coffee without sugar. Raj’s mother had left behind coffee decoction and milk in the fridge. I heated a cup of coffee on the gas stove for the guest.
When I returned to the living room, Ramalingam had already refreshed and was busy browsing a thick book from his bag. He wanted a few white sheets to scribble, which I provided after some search. He became busy without batting an eyelid. I understood the purpose of the visit within no time. He had come to participate in the Bangalore Derby, an annual event. I went back to sleep.
When I got up, Ramalingam was still busy with the paperwork. I asked him about the process out of curiosity. He had selected the winning horses from each of the day’s races. He had his algorithm for the selection. He divided the horse’s weight by the height to arrive at the number. He calculated similar numbers for the horse’s parents, added all the numbers and subtracted the sum from the jockey’s weight. He finally added this number to the sunrise time and derived the magic number. He would decide the winning horse for each race after painful arithmetic, and he was ready with the list after an effort of three hours. I have never heard of such an algorithm. I had heard of the selection of a horse by the pedigree and the winning trend of the jockey.
A recent book ‘Everybody Lies, by Seth Stephens/Davidowitz, provided me with an exciting insight into the process of how Big Data helps in selecting the winning colt. The story goes like this: Ahmed Zayat, an Egyptian beer magnate, hired the organisation EQB to choose a horse. Jeff Seder, the CEO of EQB, had an excellent reputation for selecting the horse using Big Data. He collected details of the horses, including the measurements of legs and internal organs, using imaging technology. Jeff concluded that the size of the left ventricle was the key. He ended that the larger the left ventricle, the greater the chances of winning. He helped Zayat buy the flat-footed horse, No 85 ( American Pharoah), which won the triple crown in Kentucky Derby in 2015.
What happened to the horses selected by Ramalingam? Getting back to my story, Raj and I were very excited to accompany him to the Bangalore Derby. It was my first time visiting a race course. After paying our admission fees, Ramalingam gave us a small tutorial and tour and showed us the areas of interest. He took us to the paddock before the first race and introduced us to the horse and the jockey. Ramalingam could see the differences between the horses and the jockeys while we were blank. He looked into his notes, and after observing the horse closely, he was sure that the selection was proper. He went back to a bookie and made a bet on his horse. We watched the first race, and the horse came the fourth. However, he followed the same process for all the races. He was disappointed that none of his horses made to the winning mark. Ramalingam went into reflection mode and did a deeper analysis of the debacle. We stopped by a restaurant to have a coffee on our way back. He consulted his notes and found that he had taken the wrong sun rise time in his algorithm. He was delighted that he had found a reason.
