a wolf angel is not a good angel

I watched the Belmont yesterday, where the first filly in however many years won! Hurray! Girl power! (Seriously, did anyone other than the male newscasters think girl power?)

But why has it been over a century? Well, the race is about 140 years old. I think I saw 8 horses race. Even if we assume fewer than that, we can say there have been 1000 instances of horses racing. 22 of them have been fillies, for 3 wins, which looks like very much the same ratio to me. (I’m assuming I am correct that 7 or 8 horses run, on average. The Kentucky Derby and the Preakness have much worse ratios for fillies, though. Not knowing anything about horses I can’t say what it means.)

Some sportscaster said that in Europe, where they race fillies more often, they see more fillies win, so this wouldn’t be as surprising there. Do people even listen to themselves?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 8:57 am and is filed under Complainty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.