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Alan Aitken

Are we watching a cultural revolution in Hong Kong racing - perhaps even world racing - with the Jockey Club's racing simulator app?
 Many will see that proposition and respond that, yes, it's something younger and cooler that puts racing more in touch with a generation which is more tech savvy and lives inside its smart phones and their technological gimmicks.
And to a large extent, that viewpoint is correct, but that isn't where we are coming from for this column.
No, we are thinking of a different cultural revolution - one dealing with the almost unheard of recognition in this part of the world that horse racing does lend itself to analysis, and the Race Simulator threatens to lift it beyond the realm of no or go, brake or accelerator as the only factors that influence the results.
According to chief executive Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges' blog on the Jockey Club website, there have been more than 110,000 downloads of the predictive app since its launch.
Now that number isn't going to scare the people at Angry Birds or the designers of Plague Inc, but it is significant that those who have downloaded the Race Simulator have become impressed, in some cases even obsessed, with the predictive talents of the programme.
The Race Simulator, presumably using information freely available in form guides, conjures up a graphic representation of a race as it might happen and how it might finish, and users get to watch the whole thing play out.
It's in the nature of such things that any correct prediction is met with shock and awe and perhaps the race result that caused the biggest stir was the prediction of Liberator at double-figure odds to beat Ambitious Dragon in the Standard Chartered Champions & Chater Cup last month.
Of course, that particular race, with just a few horses, well established running styles and a likely slow tempo, presented fewer difficulties for the app to predict the manner of the race and any serious horse player mapped it the same way.
The app, indeed like actual races, has a natural bias towards forward-running horses in any case, but especially so, again just like real racing, when the pace of the race is not strong, thus Liberator was given top marks.
That is where the Race Simulator has a chance to break the spell on many rank and file punters who believe there is something more mysterious, or corrupt, at work in races than the chemistry of tempo and ability.
Not all races are as tempo-predictable as the Champions & Chater and there are many fluid variables in most maps - whether jockeys will elect to go back or forward from wide barriers, in particular - but at least this app is shining a light on ways of examining races that racing professionals and serious punters have always known.
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for and a free app like Race Simulator can only take you so far - if a player does enough form himself to tweak the settings, the results might be better (or worse perhaps). 
If he does the form deeply enough to get the tweaks right then he or she probably doesn't need the simulator at all, but it does add a visual representation of whatever is input.
Perhaps the Race Simulator will help to fire a few imaginations at Sports Road on how to update the club's television coverage of racing, which has not changed in 20 years (and possibly longer than that but our own experience of it only goes back that far).
In other sports, we can see computer-generated graphics to show where all of Roger Federer's first serves landed, or where Sachin Tendulkar's scoring shots came or how far from the pin all the players in the Masters hit a particular green on a particular day at Augusta.
For the viewer without a great original interest, that makes those sports more interesting because the nuances become more accessible, and that in turn increases their reach into those parts of the community the sports have not previously reached.
Horse racing throughout the world has failed to embrace these kinds of statistical representations - strange, considering it is a sport rife with numbers that lends itself to the same kinds of ideas.
Yes, it is also a game of real, heaving animals and athletic, tactical humans riding them, but there is a place, especially in this day and age, that demands short cuts and visual extras, for computer graphics to explain and illustrate form analysis concepts which otherwise remain, well, concepts.
Perhaps it has been the cost of graphics that has held it back in most jurisdictions, but that cannot be an excuse here.
The Jockey Club already provides all the necessary ingredients to do this - the form, maps, speed ratings and statistics which appear on its website, married with the human talents required for pre-race analysis and parade-yard commentary.
The answers are all there, it's just a case of putting the answers into an attractive format for consumption and that's what the Race Simulator does well.
Unlike many others, we think the jury is out on just how accurately it forecasts race results - we've noticed a few odd ones running a race on the app but then it's all about opinions anyway - but that isn't the point.
The Race Simulator has perhaps emerged from the wrong birthplace or for the wrong reason - one gets the impression it was developed as a response to the club feeling it should have some 'smart phone' gimmick to offer younger members of the public, since smart phones are the must-have instrument of the age.
But, whether intended as a gimmick or something more, what the club has developed is an educational tool that can change the perception of racing for groups who might otherwise have seen the sport as some type of black magic, or simply as impenetrable mumbo jumbo.
And if it gets existing race fans in this part of the world to see that there is more to it than 'try or no try' when a horse wins or fails, then the Race Simulator is a step forward.



Popular app can give TV coverage a shot in the arm