Kentucky Derby swings on Bing Crosby’s star

On tiny margins, or large noses, are sporting fortunes made. That was the case at the weekend’s 150th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs where a three-horse photo finish had a worldwide audience enthralled.

The finish was described as the closest in three decades of America’s most famous horse race. A crowd of 156,710 spectators had to wait for about 10 minutes for the result to be officially posted, with judges scrutinising the photo finish before feeling confident enough to make a call.

As the runners flashed past the post, a triple dead-heat seemed possible. Separating the trio, even in the video slow-mo, was tricky, especially as the photo finish mirror was positioned a few centimetres before the tall column that everyone in the packed grandstands thought was the actual winning post.

Eventually the picture told the story. And, bizarrely, we can thank old-time crooner Bing Crosby for that.

Mystik Dan by ‘a nose’

Mystik Dan, an 18-1 shot, took the honours by what the Yanks call “a nose” but we refer to as a “short head”. The runner-up was 4-1 chance Sierra Leone, with Japanese raider Forever Young (7-1) a further nose behind in third.

Two-horse dead-heat wins are not uncommon, with an average of six each year in South Africa. No-one can remember a triple dead-heat here, though there have been a handful in the US and Australia.

There must have been triples in the old days, before photo-finishes, when a judge squinting at the winning post had the job of declaring a winner without technological help – but a weight of punters’ money upon him.

Dead-heats then were an easy option, though some brave judges did venture daring calls – often resulting in civil disturbance. An example was the 1926 Durban July: the judge said Moosme won, but evidence of all the eyes in an incensed crowd had the favourite, ironically named Narrow Gauge, ahead.

In the US, judges perched on the grandstand strung a wire above the finish line as a visual aid – from whence the ubiquitous term “down to the wire”.

People experimented with photographing finishes, but timing the snapshot was dodgy with a conventional camera. And shutter speed was a problem, with horses moving up to six inches in the time it took for apertures to clunk shut.

Bing Crosby makes his entrance

That’s when Bing Crosby came into the picture, so to speak. Horse breeder and owner – not to mention singin’ ’n’ dancin’ man – Bing was a founder of Del Mar racecourse near Hollywood and wanted the best facilities for his place.

The man who’d shot to stardom with ditties like “White Christmas”, “Swing on a Star” and “Pistol Packin’ Mama” heard about a “strip camera” that had been invented by Lorenzo del Riccio, an engineer at Hollywood’s Paramount Pictures.

Eager to impress his racing-mad fellow Hollywood stars, Bing rushed the new device into operation on the opening day of Del Mar. The rest is history.

Instead of a shutter, the thing had a narrow vertical slit, focused on the finish line. The film moved through the camera at the speed of the horses, and their images were recorded sequentially as they crossed the line. It worked a treat.

The camera doesn’t lie in terms of the winner. But it can deform body parts. When a horse’s legs move faster than its body, and the moving film, there can be oddities in the pic – like elongated legs of the horses.

Those legs should still be in good nick for the next two legs of the US Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes, in the coming weeks.

Winning trainer Ken McPeek and jockey Brian Hernandez jnr – a duo who, incidentally, won the Kentucky Oaks the previous day – were not saying whether Mystik Dan would tackle those two races, but it would be a tad obtuse not to with Bing’s gizmo there to help them out.