The jury is out on one aspect of the Meydan set up - the Trakus system used for varying purposes, including sectional times and the enhancement of the 'viewing experience' for racegoers.
In fact the jury has been out for more than four years at Woodbine racetrack in Canada, where the system first emerged, despite tracks in the United States taking it up since.
Trakus uses antennae above the track, receiving signals from transponders in the saddlecloths of the horses in a race and converting that to sectional times, as well as a live representation of the race as it happens. This 'race show' originally had coloured squares circling a track, each representing a real horse and its position, and has more recently been enhanced, using cartoon-style horses.
While it was certainly better than the television cameras on Saturday in the first half of the Alquoz Sprint at Meydan - when runners were invisible, buried in a weird pea-soup fog for the first 500m - it still struck us as having inaccuracies. Horse A might be represented as several lengths off the lead in one moment, for example, then zooming up to the lead in the next as the system received new signals and revised the picture a second later. This happened with monotonous regularity.
We can only conclude this disconcerting feature was due to line-of-sight issues which are an obvious sticking point for this kind of technology in the hustle and bustle of a race with horses sitting so close to one another, as well as any other wave interference that might be available between the saddlecloths and the antennae.
In terms of customer entertainment, on the other hand, we can see that fans watching a race might find it easier to follow than the actual race telecast, so it does have its purposes, particularly for new customers.
