Start

The list of the horses entered in a race: their numbers, their teams, and — once the race has been run — the finish.

You open it with the Start button, at the foot of a race's card. It is the only place where the result is displayed, and that is deliberate: you can watch the race without knowing who wins.

Reading a line

• The number, on the left. A dash means it has not been allotted yet: numbers are only given at the close of entries.
• The horse, its breeding, then its sex and age, and finally its earnings and score. Enough to judge the level of the opposition at a glance.
• The owner, then the trainer and the jockey. All three are clickable.

The horses are arranged by number before the race, and by finishing order after it.

The handicap, or the weight

This column only appears if the race is a handicap, and only once entries are closed — before that, the handicaps are not calculated.

• In trot, it is headed Handicap and displays the setback in metres, for example +25 m. An empty cell means the horse starts from the line.
• On the flat and over hurdles, it is headed Weight and displays the weight carried, from 55 to 60 kg. The slowest carries the minimum, the fastest the maximum.

It is the column to look at before betting on a handicap race: it says in one figure whom the game considers the best, and by how much.

The finish

As soon as the race has been run, two columns are added: the place and the time.

A horse with no place did not finish: it fell over hurdles, or it was disqualified in trot for galloping too long. A brief gallop, for its part, only costs lengths and does not prevent appearing at the finish. The viewer will tell you what happened, and that is generally more instructive than the table: see watching the race.

Compare the times with each other rather than in the absolute: they depend on the distance, the turf and the discipline. A horse's time is only worth something in relation to those of its opponents of the day, or to its own balanced time.

What the organiser sees in addition

If the race is yours, an extra column gives the horse's code and that of its owner.

That is not a technical curiosity: those codes are what you copy into the reservation field of a following race, in order to invite exactly the same horses again. And it is also where a competition manager takes the code of a horse to award a medal to, where searching by name can pick the wrong namesake. See My races and Medal.

Refusing an entry

A delete button appears on each line, but in one precise case only: you must be the organiser, the race must be a competition, it must still be in the Registration state, the deadline must not have passed, and the horse must not have received its number. All five conditions are required together.

The refusal refunds the owner in full, frees his horse, and sends him a message telling him that his entry has been refused — with no reason given. It is a tool of sporting judgement, not a financial one: you gain nothing from it and you lose some takings.

So announce your rules in advance, and explain your refusal of your own accord: the automatic message is terse, and an entry set aside without a word is felt as an injustice. The full framework is in the racecourse manager's trade.

Knowing whom you are racing against

That is the main use of this list, and it changes right up to the last moment: entries often come in during the last hour, when the quotas per owner and per jockey are raised a notch. A field judged the day before is not the one at the start.

If you are the jockey, you have better. The preparation window contains its own list of runners, a fuller one: it adds each opponent's last race, and it highlights your line. That is where to work, not here. See preparing the race.

This list keeps two advantages: it is accessible to everybody from the race's card — an owner, a punter, a curious onlooker — and it is the only one to show the finish once the race has been run.

In every case, the right moment to read it again is just after closing: only then are the numbers and the handicaps known.