Talk:Epsom Derby

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[edit] Odds

Forgive me for asking, but how do you know what odds were being offered in the Nineteenth Century? Surely that depended upon who you were betting with, especially as off-course betting was illegal in the UK before the mid 1960s. A penny takes a quid that the odds quoted for the earliest races listed cannot be proved with any great veracity, not enough for an encyclopaedia anyway.

Sweetalkinguy 22:46, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Im not sure exactly but I know that you could telegram bets in to the course, so you might have needed SPs for that. Lazmac 17:24, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Winning Times and Creationism Debate

This graph is a bit misleading - for instance the cluster of fast times in the 1940s may have something to do with the Derby being held at a different racecourse (Newmarket) during World War II. The winning time can be affected by many diverse factors - ground conditions, wind strength/direction, race tactics etc. And how accurate are the early timings? - Zafonic 11:30, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Surely this is not a relevant item to include in this section? The article is about the race, the Epsom Derby, and not about evolution. More fundamentally, it conflates selective breeding by human intervention over a couple of centuries, with natural selection acting over billions of years. No serious creationist claims that human selective breeding cannot influence the characteristics of some strain of a species. No evolutionist would recognise these graphs as having any relevance to the subject. The section should be removed from here, and, if there's any appetite for the evolutionism/creationism debate on Wikipedia, moved to some appropriate section in that area. --King Hildebrand 13:24, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Origins

So, what first race was in 1661? --P64 01:29, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] winning margin

The winning margin is at least as important as the time. Please could someone add a column to the table and include this information (note how often it is mentioned in articles about Shergar (ten lengths 1981) and how one of the points mentioned when discussing this years winner Authorized (2007) is his winning margin was the largest since Slip Anchor (seven lengths 1985).

I noticed that there are individual tables from the 1988 Epsom Derby so all someone has to do is go through them (sigh!) to extract the information. But perhaps someone else has a complete table (hopefully). --Philip Baird Shearer 11:28, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

OK I've extracted the information from the "Year Epsom Derby" articles. --Philip Baird Shearer 11:56, 15 July 2007 (UTC)