According to sportswriter Robert Harron of Collier’s Illustrated Weekly, “this electric camera has reduced horse-race finishes to a scientific certainty, doing away with the error of oblique viewing and all other pitfalls.” He continued his praise of the new technology: “The announcement [of the race finish] was greeted with cheers, the purse was split, the jockey fees were split and the customers were satisfied. Horse racing is one business-sports enterprise in which the customer can’t always be right. If he were, somebody would go broke a great deal faster than you and I do now. But if we have to lose our money—and it was Damon Runyon who observed laconically that ‘all horse players must die broke’—I think it is only right that we lose it in the most painless manner possible. …The Eye in the Sky has eased the pain in the vicinity of the pocket in which you carry your wallet, for you must admit that the shock of losing isn’t nearly so painful when it is quick and beyond all doubt.”1

Despite such admiration for photo-finish systems—a popularity no doubt abetted by the general public’s fascination with futuristic technologies like X-rays, motion pictures, and the instantaneous wire transmission of news photographs—the “scientific certainty” provided by a photo finish is anything but truthful. If the film is calibrated to move faster or slower than the subjects, parts of the image will be distorted. This occurs very often in photo-finish images. Slower objects are elongated. Quicker objects appear compressed. This is why wheels moving faster than the racing figures appear oval-shaped. Another common distortion in photo-finish images is the appearance of a “ghost leg”: if a horse happens to step on the finish line as it passes by, for example, its leg will be still and will thus appear as a ghostly blur.