Frodon's ratings, the ones I've worked out rather than Mike's, tell a similar story - his last 6 runs (most recent first) have been 110 (Saturday), 127,141, 148, 140,124 - he's a good horse but I think his edge is jumping rather than speed, and he couldn't live with the two principles on Saturday who simply went too fast for him. Probably the same with Ballyoptic, last 6 figs 101, 112, 132, 83, 98, 124 - both horses that can dominate a race and put up a good figure if allowed to race in their comfort zone, but struggling against high class pacier rivals perhaps. (Forest Bihan at Haydock highlighted for me that Frodon's jumping is his strong point rather than pace).
Haydock going stick for Saturday was 4.9 hurdles/5.0 chases, yet Topspeed ratings were based on the chase going being 0.75 s/f slow with the hurdles at 0.45. If you check the seconds per furlong slower than standard time figures and put the races in order of sluggishness you get:
0.43, 0.60, 0.65, 0.74, 0.85, 0.95, 1.10 - the chase values are in bold, now to me that sequence looks like it doesn't need fiddling with - how do the RP justify saying that the races in bold 'deserved' to be rated more leniently, as the going was slower for chases than hurdles? It's poppycock, if the chase course going was noticeably slower then the chase times per furlong would all be at the bottom end of the line with the 3 hurdle races fastest. There were no rail moves by the way.
Lostintranslation, without the benefit of a dodgy allowance, earned a 110. None of the TS chase ratings from Haydock bear any degree of scrutiny in my opinion. That doesn't mean the chasers ran poorly, the fancied runners won the better races, but they didn't do it all that quickly.
Lostintranslation's OR was 161, Bristol De Mai 170, Frodon 169, Ballyoptic 159 yet off level weights they pretty near finished in the reverse order of their OR's, you have to figure that Frodon and Ballyoptic ran below the ratings by a considerable amount, Frodon was rated 8 lbs better but got beaten 26.5l. Ballyoptic rated 2lb inferior ended up 43.5l behind the winner - Bristol De Mai ran a bit below his rating or Lostintranslation increased his (this is the view I expect the handicapper will be taking).
I agree with Mike, the figures they wax lyrical over are only high because they made them high by artificially inflating them. Having done that to get the 'right' sort of figure for lostintranslation they had to slap a similarly inflated value on all the chasers, including Crievehill.
Dave