Now semi-retired after a 40-year career as a racing writer and columnist at the Washington Post, lifelong gambler Andrew Beyer is best known as the creator of the speed figures bearing his name.
Beyer (pronounced ‘Buyer’), who is 77 (dob 17/11/43), revolutionised handicapping for a generation of horseplayers, changing the way races are scrutinised forever when he revealed the secrets of clock-based analysis, prioritising speed over class, in his 1975 book, Picking Winners.
However, while Beyer Speed Figures have long enjoyed near-scriptural status in U.S. racing, their author's influence has stretched well beyond the confines of the gambling arena, thanks to his opinionated, trenchant columns, primarily in the pages of the Washington Post, where he was particularly outspoken in criticism of a prevalent doping culture in the sport.
A winner of the Walter Haight Award for career excellence, Beyer received the ultimate honour with an Eclipse Award of Merit in 2017.
Who do you believe is the most important figure the history of racing around the world?
I don’t have a good answer to this question, but I’ll refer to the first book I ever read about the history of racing, David Alexander’s wonderful A Sound of Horses. No one was more important to the sport than William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who bred Eclipse, progenitor of most of the Thoroughbreds on earth.
Which is your favorite venue and race anywhere in the world?
My all-time favorite track was Hialeah. I’ve never known a better way to spend a day at the races than to sit in a lawn chair underneath a palm tree in the Hialeah paddock.
After Hialeah’s demise, Saratoga inherited the status of America’s greatest racetrack and I haven’t missed a running of the Woodward Stakes since it was moved to Saratoga in 2006 —a race with a glorious history in a glorious setting. Sadly, it’s moving back to Belmont Park in 2021.
What is your fondest memory in racing?
As a gambler, my fondest racing memories all involve betting rather than the grandeur of the sport. In December 1990, I fell in love with a horse named Sun In Action, who was running in a maiden race at Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell Park.
At that time, I was embarking on a career as a turf writer, and I wrote a column for the Washington Daily News declaring that Sun In Action was “the betting opportunity of the year”.
I went to Liberty Bell, wagered all of my meagre funds on Sun In Action – and watched him lose by a nose. Then the stewards disqualified the winner and put up Sun In Action’s number at odds of 20/1. What memory could top that?
What do you see as the biggest challenge racing faces today?
The biggest challenge facing the sport today is the same one that I wrote about for much of my newspaper career: The widespread use of illegal drugs. Almost any serious horseplayer can look at the form of certain trainers’ horses and recognise that their performances defy handicapping logic. The cheating trainers and vets have made cynics out of the horseplayers, who should love this game without reservation.
If you could change one thing in racing, what would it be?
I think I’ve answered that in question four!