Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem for Feb. 6, 2025

A good Thursday morning to you all! Getting ready for our big weekend here in Tampa with the Sam F. Davis headlining a 12-race card, and we talked all about it on today’s podcast if you want to hear some of my thoughts.  

For today’s column, I wanted to discuss something from the world of calling races. If there was one thing I wished more people understood about calling races is how different it looks through binoculars than what you’re seeing on tv. Over the years, I’ve seen people comment or criticize race callers for something and on occasion I'll engage to tell them why a caller might have not mentioned something in the race, but I usually just get told I’m sticking up for my friends. Which of course is part of it. But the other part of that is I try to make people understand maybe how a “mistake” happened and often that it wasn’t a mistake. The biggest culprit is, THEY DIDN’T SEE IT!

Now you can say not seeing it is an error by the announcer and in some cases that might be true. But in others, let me try and explain why I don’t think it is. I personally use a pair of Swarovski SLC 10x magnification binoculars which means the image I see through them is magnified by 10 times a normal eye view. I would say the most commonly used binoculars of my colleagues are the Canon image stabilizer binoculars which have different sizes, but 15x is the normal magnification I seem to see people use on those. Which means they’re zoomed in much farther than I am. But the main sacrifice they give up with being closer in is that they don’t see the width of the field nearly as much.  

The goal with your pre-race memorization is so that you never have to come off of the binoculars to look at the program. It’s amazing how fast something can happen in that one or two seconds you’re looking away and as you know in horse racing, things can happen in a flash and you miss it completely. The biggest example I can think of this happening is spills. It’s just hard to explain to people who don’t watch races through binoculars how fast a spill can happen through your glasses. If you’re looking at the leaders of the race through zoomed in binoculars and a spill happens at the back, you most likely won’t see it. If you’re at the back of the field and a spill happens at the front, you’ll see that something happened but will likely be very confused as to who was involved or what happened. It just happens so fast. 

I saw on twitter recently someone calling out an announcer for not seeing a spill in this exact situation above. The race caller was at the front of the field and the spill happened at the back. And because you’re moving left with the field, you just completely don’t see it. It’s happened to me before and it’s happened to some of the best race callers of all-time. The most famous example I can think of was in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff (G1) when Pine Island fell. Trevor Denman had just gotten back to the leaders and was looking through zoomed in binoculars at those leaders when Pine Island fell at the back. It was clearly out of his vision range with the glasses and the reason he likely never mentioned it was because again, he had no way of seeing it. The other thing is that when you realize something might be amiss, you don’t have time to start looking around to see if or where something might have happened. 

I remember arguing with a guy on a chat forum after the Pine Island thing and explained to him exactly why Trevor didn’t mention Pine Island and the guy just kept telling me that he made a “bad call.” Trevor is considered by many a top 1 or 2 race caller in American history and he doesn’t need little old me to defend him, but he didn’t make a mistake by not calling the spill. He just didn’t see it and any announcer in the same spot probably doesn’t see it as well. 

I can think of a few other notable examples when this happens and I just wish people understood how easy it is to miss stuff when watching through the binoculars. It really is as much about being lucky or unlucky as it is skill when it comes to seeing odd stuff in a race. I remember a spill years ago when a very famous rider got injured at the top of the homestretch. The announcer had glanced at the tote board for literally a second to read the half-mile fraction and by the time they looked back the spill had happened and the field was on their way home. Just a second looking away and the incident was missed. 

People are allowed to criticize pretty much whatever they want, and announcers are no exception. You’re free to do whatever you want, but I’m just as free to try and explain and even sometimes defend folks that I think are being wrongfully criticized. 

Oh, before I leave, let me bring up one more thing people might not realize is way different calling races than watching on television and that’s calling photos. So much of calling photos depends on where your booth placement is and how far away the grandstand is from the actual wire. I remember standing in the Belmont booth with Larry Collmus and it looked like a mile out to that inner turf finish line. I would think it would be a brutal place to call photos, but on TV, with a zoomed in huge camera, it’s obviously way easier. Tampa Bay Downs I’m past the wire a good 30 feet or so and the angle is not great for calling really close photos. So I tend to be more timid here than most places I’ve worked. River Downs was the best for this as you were directly on the wire. I probably chickened out on maybe three photos in three years. 

Have a great weekend everyone!