How are photo finishes like the one at Kentucky Derby 2024 judged? What we know.

In a true photo finish, this year’s Kentucky Derby-winning horse, Mystik Dan, didn’t even win by a full nose.

A photo shared on the official Kentucky Derby page on the social media platform X showed the tip of Mystik Dan’s nose just barely past those of Sierra Leone and Forever Young in the closest Derby finish since 1996.

Racing fans have technology to thank for the results.

A high-speed camera mounted at the finish line takes photos — and lots of them — to create a composite photo of the finish that allows judges to determine how the horses place, Kimber Murray, a judge at Lone Star Park in Grand Praire, Texas, explained in a 2021 Paulick Report article.

The computer program can place a vertical line on the photo to allow judges to compare where horses were.

In particularly tight races, Murray said one or more stewards might come in to weigh in on the finish along with placing judges at Lone Star.

“Even if there’s a dead heat, you can blow it up really big and see the individual hairs on the horses’ chins,” Murray told the Paulick Report.

Churchill Downs, as well as Belmont Park and Pimlico Race Course, where the other two legs of the Triple Crown are run, use a system by Lynx System Developers to capture images of race finishes that the company’s website says “are accurate to 1/1,000th of a second (.001) or greater.”

The cameras capture thousands of frames per second.

Jerry Mahoney told WAVE-TV 3 in Louisville in 2008 that he used four cameras to film each race from the rooftop of Churchill Downs, and on Derby Day, he had a fifth as a backup.

Mahoney, an employee of American Teletimer, said then that he had been timing the races for two decades.

An American Teletimer employee who operates photo finish equipment at Meadowlands Racing and Entertainment in New Jersey said in a YouTube video that he manually activates two timers at the three-quarters pole there.

When the horses are 50 yards from the finish line, he said he presses a button, and the camera captures each horse as it crosses the finish line. A judge then reviews the order of finish with him after the race.

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