The odds must be crazy

by Len Ragozin

Hailed as the man who revolutionized handicapping, Len Ragozin is renowned in the world of horse racing not only for his maverick style but for his consistent success in picking winners. Every day, savvy horseplayers purchase his handicapping charts - The Sheets - for their precision ratings. A graduate of Harvard University and a lifelong communist, Ragozin has perfected a brilliant and iconoclastic speed-handicapping system that works. Throwing out what he describes as. The "snowstorm" of Daily Racing Form data that overwhelm most fans, Ragozin considers only objective physical factors - the horse's true time, wind speed, the weight carried, and track resiliency - and mathematically boils them down to one simple figure. The lower the number, the better the horse. Just as important, The Sheets track each horse's individual race patterns, not only revealing the ebbs and flows of past performances but also indicating when the horse is. About to run the race of its life. After forty year