Race charts came into use in the 1880s; the Daily Racing Form started printing them in 1894, and, in 1896, started publishing a chart annual.

Past performances were included starting in 1905.

Equibase, a partnership between the Jockey Club and the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America, was formed in 1990 to establish an industry-owned database.

In 1998, the Daily Racing Form stopped creating their own charts and became Equibase’s principal customer. Equibase.com launched in 1995, and eBase implemented in 2000. Ever since, racetrack race results are posted within minutes of the finish of each race in the nation; charts are usually up before the next race.

Steeplechase coverage isn’t quite as prompt, Chamberlin notes, since he’s “often working out at a jump meet in the boondocks, you know, no cell coverage and no wi-fi or press box.

“Plus, I’m having to travel for a lot of these meets. Gold Cup, I’m home in a half-hour after the races and I get those charts up that same night. Radnor, say, it takes me four hours to get home and I’m exhausted from the drive. Those I put up the next day.”

“Closed well” was how Chamberlin described Belsaurius’s sweeping move at the top of the long run-in at the Middleburg, Virginia course not far from his home in Bluemont. “Rallied in stretch” gave life to Rashaan's valiant, but too little, too late, efforts.

Martin Chamberlin tells the story of his short stint as owner-breeder.

I was with my sister one day at Philadelphia Park (now Parx), this was after her classmate Mike Walsch was at the Racing Form. We were chit-chatting with some female trainer. I can’t remember who.

She had this mare that had bone chips in her knees, and she was telling the owner it’s time to stop on her (Maryland-bred Frowning Jack, a hard-knocking claimer who’d won six races at 4 at Penn and the old Keystone but whose performance had tailed off sharply.)

We looked up her form, and she’s a really nice horse, by Noble Jay and had some form. I said to Mike, ‘hey, let’s buy her and breed her.’

I called up the owner, and he was hemming and hawing. I’d pretty much forgotten about it but then one day he calls me back about six months later and says okay, you can have her. She was turned out at a farm in south Jersey, so we hired a 4-H girl with a little horse trailer and went to pick her up.

We got to the farm and there’s nobody there. I knocked on the door, looked around the barn, all over the farm. Nobody. So we just went out to the field and grabbed her and loaded her up.

I felt a little bit like a horse thief.”

Chamberlin eventually found the owner to legitimize the sale with a few hundred bucks. The excited partners sent Frowning Jack to Maryland stallion Son Excellence and brought her back to New Jersey to foal.

The resulting colt, who Chamberlin named Abstract Thinker, didn’t make it to the races at 2, and by then the mare had another foal on the ground. With three horses to board, a pregnant mare and no revenue stream, the partnership dissolved. They sold the filly foal, sold the mare and reluctantly sold Abstract Thinker.

Abstract Thinker turned out to be just the type owner-breeders dream of, a real war-horse. He had nine wins and 24 on-the-board finishes, from 55 starts and nearly $140,000 in earnings over six seasons from ages 3 to 8. And though he never made more than a regional mark, Son Excellence catered to breeders racing their own stock. He passed along durability and extreme soundness: most of his progeny, fillies included, made more than 10 starts. A half-dozen of his sons made more than 100 starts; one ran 179 times.

The veracity of the historic record of any sport is no better than its record-keepers and record-keeping.

Even without betting at most jump meets, the chart caller’s job is still hugely relevant. “This is the history of the sport,” he says, but there’s a less glamorous need for fast, accurate documentation of every horse in every race. “A lot of these (spring and fall circuit hunt meet) horses will be showing up over the summer” in jump races at the major tracks, Chamberlin notes. “The steeplechase charts tell the story so people can make an educated assessment” with their wagers.

Much like chart calls at the flat track, steeplechase charts follow a predictable trajectory – starting position, a few calls during the body of the race, one or two in the stretch, and finish position with lengths behind noted.

Since there are rarely helpful painted poles marking points of call like at the track, Chamberlin makes up his own. “My favorite courses – Fair Hill, Far Hills – those you can see the whole course,” he says. “The ones that are hardest are the timber courses where the horses go out of sight.”

He records the action using his own verbal shorthand on two handheld tape recorders, and backs up the observations on the taped replay footage in the stewards’ stand.

Chamberlin grew up in Scotts Plains, New Jersey, near Newark. He wasn’t introduced to horse racing until the summer of his high school senior year. “My sister was studying at Boston University, and I went up there to stay with her for a summer job,” he says. “I knew nothing at all about horses.

“My sister and her friends would go to Suffolk Downs to party and bet every weekend, and I got to liking tagging along with them. I liked reading the racing form and figuring out how to bet.”

One of Karen Chamberlin’s classmates was Mike Welsch, eventual chart-caller, and later clocker and race reporter for the Daily Racing Form.

“Something with the experience going to the racetrack really resonated with me,” Chamberlin says. His freshman year at Rutgers, he decided to get a summer job as a hotwalker to get closer to the action.

He arrived at the Monmouth Park stable gate at 8 a.m. one early summer morning, “which seemed like a reasonable time to show up for work to me,” he recalls with a laugh. “The guard said come next morning at 6.”

The next day, Chamberlin drove through the dark from Scotts Plains and presented himself at the appointed hour.

He got his first backstretch gig, walking hots for trainer Bob Dunham (left, ©Tod Marks), who trained 1972 Eclipse champion sprinter Chou Croute. By the end of the summer, Chamberlin was grooming.

The next summer he went to Saratoga and got a job with Phipps stable trainer John Russell. Chamberlin worked as the “swing groom,” taking care of three different horses every day to give the other grooms a rotating day off. “I learned a lot,” he says. “You get exposed to so many horses that way.”

He graduated in 1973, and took his economics degree to jobs in the printing industry and as a retail buyer before he went back to school on a technical track. Horses were on the shelf except weekends at Monmouth. Chamberlin learned computer programming in the already rapidly emerging IT industry.

His first steeplechase was the old Monmouth Hunt meet on the Haskell estate. “This sport was the same but different” than flat racing, Chamberlin remembers the festive crowd.

The Monmouth Hunt Races. Photo courtesy of the Monmouth County Hunt.