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The old expression is germane here:"not being able to see the forest for the trees," as the reductionists of the world (the "databasers") truly believe that looking at PARTS in ISOLATION, somehow allows the concept of the WHOLE to slither through. The first fraction of MOST races is so polluted with all manor of poor/abnormally fast breaks, poor horses (remember who lead the 1996 Breeder's Cup Turf to the first call?: Rick's Natural Star), experiments in jockey's trying to alter the running style of an animal, or just dumb luck, to be evaluated as a stand alone factor. It is not until the pollution falls by the wayside, the 2nd call, that animals are in a position to make the remainder of the race (the whole) come to light, and of course, this varies by the energy requirements of the specific courses.
Imagine trying to understand the concept of an internal combustion engine just looking at an exhaust manifold or piston ring. Imagine a physician (or the popular con artists of today i.e. reflexologists, some chiropractors, etc.) trying to understand human body health by only looking at liver or respiratory function to the exclusion of the sum of pathologies. A concept must rest upon the whole, taken as a whole.
This concept of factors in isolation has been debunked through the centuries in cultural equivalents akin to the Aesop fable about the 8 blind men who, for the first time, confront an elephant. Each man only responds to a PART of the whole, and as such, make wildly inaccurate conclusions as to the whole: the one who just touched the trunk thinks the animal to be "snake-like," the one touching a leg thinks the animal is "tree-like," and another touching only the skin thinks it to be much like an alligator and so on.
I continue to get a kick out of "databasers" and their grandstand approach to a sport that demands a more up close evaluation of the realities of it's nature rather than the "arm's length" conjectures and conclusions of pure data.
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