The Legend of Pittsburg Phil
In the years before 1894, when the Daily Racing Form first started publishing, there was only one way to handicap horse races with past performance charts - you had to make the charts yourself. The number of people who were compiling data on horse races and making their own charts prior to the 1890s was most likely very small, but nobody was as successful at using racing data to inform his bets than a young man from outside of Pittsburgh named George E. Smith.