Hong Kong racing has entered new territory this season with the introduction of timing technology more familiar to Formula 1 pit walls or Olympic velodromes than the trainers’ stand at Sha Tin.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club has told Idol Horse it has rolled out a new sectional timing system, replacing manually collected trackwork and barrier trial times with data “accurate to within 0.003 of a second”.
The technology, built by Dutch company MYLAPS, has been used at some of the biggest sporting events on the globe, including Formula 1, NASCAR, the Olympics and the Tokyo Marathon.
“They wanted to get into horse racing and they approached us two years ago,” the Club’s head of raceday operations, Stephen Higgins, said. “They demonstrated that their system was most importantly accurate, but also consistent and operationally implementable for horses.
“It was previously done manually from the grandstand by somebody with a stopwatch and then uploaded onto the system. While that was very good and with the Club’s investment there were enough people taking those times, clearly it can’t be as accurate as something passing over a sensor with that information going straight into the system.”
With the new system, each horse carries a small electronic tag inside its saddle cloth. The tags are waterproof, can be washed, and last up to five years without replacement. Timing cables underneath the track register the exact moment a horse passes a marker, feeding the data directly into the system.
“We’ve got timing cabling at every 400 metre marker – so 1600m, 1200m, 800m, 400m – and every single horse that goes across is timed and recorded accurately,” Higgins said.
“The cabling was put in last summer so we’ve been trialling it and it launched on August 1. This means that the information that’s now going on the [Hong Kong Jockey Club] website is accurate to within 0.003 of a second.”
On top of the heightened level of accuracy, the new technology aims to provide trainers with instant data during trackwork and barrier trials.
“The trainer can sit with his phone or his iPad and he can watch the data in real time,” Higgins continued. “He can watch his horses work and both he and the [assistant trainer] will then get an SMS with the sectionals. It’s instantly uploaded, so they can watch it in real time.”
The technology from MYLAPS, which was acquired by Garmin in July this year, has been welcomed by Hong Kong’s trainers. When asked what he thought of the new technology, trainer Caspar Fownes said the convenience has been a revelation.
“It’s outstanding,” Fownes said. “As the horse is literally passing the line, your mobile phone pings with the sectional time. It’s very, very good. Obviously, your whole life you’ve been there with a stopwatch in your hand, clocking them, and now it’s just great to have that convenience.
“Times are changing. Everything’s getting more digital and the long may it continue.”
The system is now being used for barrier trials through integration with the starting gate signal. Beyond the track, sensors have also been installed at the trotting ring, Penfold Park, and the Olympic Stables riding arena.
“When horses go across those sensors, we know that they’ve entered the trotting ring or we know they’ve entered Penfold Park,” Higgins said. “We’ve also got some different sections on the back for the jump outs, so we’ll collect the data off the turf. We’ve got them down the straight here for the 1,000-metre trials, so when we trial here on turf we’ll also get that data.”
The new sectional data is uploaded to the HKJC website at 10am every morning. ∎
