Page 20 - February 2007 The Game

20 The Game, February 2007 Canada’s Thoroughbred Racing Newspaper
Daily Racing Form: Long-Time Bible of the Serious Horseplayer
It is one of the great constants of a day at the track – the Daily Racing Form. The Form has been around longer than most of the betting essentials we take for granted; before there was pari-mutuel wagering, there was a Racing Form. Before the inception of the starting gate, or tele-timers, or triactors, or videotape replays, there was a Racing Form.
The man to thank for this highly revered publication is Frank Brunell. In 1894, he acted on an inspiration to provide racing fans with a daily newspaper devoted only to horse racing. Brunell’s first Daily Racing Form came out as a four page broadsheet on November 17, 1894.
“The very first past performance lines were primitive and sketchy,” says Steven Crist, who, as Publisher and columnist of today’s Form, presides over a much more sophisticated product. “I guess they were better than nothing, but it’s hard for me to see how people would make intelligent gambling decisions based on that information.”
The past performance information printed for the 32nd Kentucky Derby would appear laughable compared to the motherlode of statistics, race numbers and comments that accompany all the horses today. There were seven entrants in that Derby in 1906, but only a total of 27 running lines. Some of the horses had all
their races identified, others were missing races. And the bettors were asked to be veritable sleuths; when races were printed, they did not include the date or the class – provided instead was a five number code that could be looked up in a monthly chart book published by the DRF.
Like anything subject to the natural improvements of evolution, the DRF slowly amended and elevated itself, but for the most part changes were not particularly dramatic, at least not until the age of computers swept the land.
In 1971, the DRF started publishing its Eastern Edition, considered the first full- sized, multi-track computerized racing
Front page from the first Daily Racing Form In 1894
newspaper ever published. That edition carried past performances for four tracks – Pitt Park, Waterford Park, Shenandoah Downs and Laurel Park.
“It improved very slowly and very incrementally until the 1980s and 1990s, when database technology made it possible to store, manipulate and present information,” says Crist.
Crist was directly involved in a series of events that allowed the DRF to make the quantum leap into the third millennium.
“In 1991, I started a competitor to the Racing Form called the Racing Times,” says Crist, with a rueful edge to his voice. DRF was not happy having competition in a market that it had traditionally ruled. The Racing Times lasted just two years; there was a complicated tale involving Racing Times publisher Robert Maxell who wanted to go to war with DRF publisher Robert Murdoch. Maxwell may or may not have been associated with the Russian KGB and he may or may not have died after falling off a boat in the Mediterranean in 1991. At any rate, the Racing Times went under and Crist found himself at loose ends.
“I went broke off that,” he admits. “Then I bounced around and did a few other things in the industry.”
In the late 90s, the DRF was up for sale and Crist saw an opportunity that danced in front of him like a 10-1 shot dropping in class from turf to dirt. He put together a syndicate that purchased the Form in 1998 for a reported $40 million.
“When we bought the property, I functioned as the day-to-day CEO for a few years,” says Crist, who still favours the ponytail look adopted during his years at Harvard studying Renaissance Literature, “It wasn’t my first choice in life to be a businessman.”
If being a suit was uncomfortable for Crist, dragging the Form into the modern world was obviously a challenge he enjoyed. When he ran the Racing Times, he introduced many changes to the past performances and he immediately morphed them onto the Form.
“We basically doubled the amount of information that appeared,” says Crist. “The Beyers, the career records – there’s about 58 new pieces of information that we had introduced in the Racing Times.”
Nothing has affected the habits of horseplayers more than the Beyer numbers that Crist began printing in the