Handicappers' Corner Olympic Special: Timeform rate Usain Bolt!

Looking back on it, my fixation with measuring and comparing sporting performances started with the Olympics of 1968 and 1972. Who was fastest, who was highest, who was strongest?

Fascinated by such questions though my juvenile self was, the answers were usually rather simple, unchallenging even.

Fast times, big heights and heavy weights defined the best. If there was any doubt, those "best" met regularly in competition and usually settled the score.

It was only when getting my first horseracing Form Book at the age of 10 that I realised sporting measurements and comparisons could be grippingly complex.

The rest, as they say, is history (though History proved to be just one of the academic subjects which took a back seat to my new obsession).

Still, it was an absolute given that I would reconnect with my childhood self when London 2012 came round. I even gave up the big annual holiday in order to buy tickets for the athletics and return to my favourite city for a week.

Jess, Mo, Greg, Mo: I cheered them on every bit as enthusiastically as I would have as a kid, but with one crucial difference. My understanding of horseracing enhanced my understanding of athletics, where once it had been the other way round.

Athletics and horseracing are, of course, very different in some respects. But the physical challenge of maximising your chances of beating your rivals is remarkably similar.

The interplay of position and pace are crucial in both track athletics and horseracing. Go too slow, or too fast, and your overall time will suffer: race too prominently, or too far back, and your position is likely to suffer.

A failure to put these principles into practice- as happened in two of the women's races in the Olympics in particular- is excusable in the heat of the moment, but the failure of commentators to communicate the reality of the situation was less so.

One area where horseracing trumps athletics, in my view, is in gauging the merit of performers who have not necessarily competed against each other and who may even be of different generations.

The nature of horseracing- in which head-to-head clashes occur infrequently and are not always definitive- means that sophisticated methods of inferential comparison between horses that have never met (and may never meet) have been developed.

Ratings may not be everyone's cup of tea- and individual ratings most certainly are not- but they have become some sort of accepted benchmark for evaluation of equine performance since Timeform was founded in 1948.

The closest thing to ratings in athletics seems to be the IAAF scoring system, which allows standardised comparisons to be made across disciplines and not just against record times.

Hence, we know that a 10.00 second men's 100 metres is equivalent to 1:43.86 for a men's 800 metres or 20.50 metres for a women's shot put. Besides anything else, some world records are better than others.

Ever wondered who really is the Frankel of athletics? I did, so I attempted to convert the IAAF scoring system into the more familiar language of Timeform ratings.

According to IAAF scoring, the best individual athletics winning performances at the London 2012 Olympics were as follows, along with their provisional ratings on a "Timeform" scale:

Usain Bolt, 100 metres men (144 TF); Usain Bolt, 200 metres men (142 TF); David Rudisha, 800 metres men (137 TF); Jessica Ennis, heptathlon women (135 TF); Aries Merritt, 110 metres hurdles men (132 TF); Nadezdha Ostapchuk, shot put women (130 TF). Bolt is worth a Frankel-tastic 147 at his best, by the way.

And what of Mo Farah, winner of the men's 5000 and 10000 metres?

Those efforts were "worth" ratings of just 98 and 117 respectively.

Herein lies the problem with assessing athletic performance when tactics are involved and individual bests are not pursued. Mo Farah "is" a 129-rated athlete, judged on his personal best at the longer distance, but tactical contests meant he dipped well below that in winning both Olympic Golds.

It happens sometimes in athletics, and it happens all the time in horseracing, which is why times alone are an insufficient measure in both fields but particularly the latter.

And it is why "what you beat and how you beat it" is important, and why sophisticated ways of measuring this complex matter have been developed in horseracing.

It is also worth remembering one other crucial reason why horseracing should appeal more than athletics to the numerically curious and why I probably made the right move in opting to follow the former more than the latter 40 or so years ago: top athletics events on which you can bet seriously come along infrequently, while betting on horseracing is possible each and every day.

Imagine having to wait four years to capitalise fully on your knowledge of your chosen sport!