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Lots of us thought he was a dog! As the series of second places built up to four, many people including me were quick to brand the Francis-Henri Graffard-trained four-year-old Calandagan ungenuine – at the very least a gelding that perhaps didn’t try as hard as he should, writes Tony Stafford.
For a while his biggest claim to fame was that as a gelding, he wasn’t qualified to run in his home country’s greatest race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Graffard and regular stable jockey Mickael Barzalona won that this year anyway with the year-younger Daryz, like Calandagan a home-bred from the late Aga Khan’s studs.
Their owner died earlier this year, so missed one of the most glorious chapters of his lifetime as an owner-breeder. Calandagan’s rise to being officially the top racehorse in the world gained a fitting gilding to that accolade when he became the first overseas winner of the Japan Cup for 20 years at Tokyo racecourse yesterday.
The last one was Luca Cumani-trained and Frankie Dettori-ridden Alkaased, whose winning time of 2 minutes 22.1 seconds in 2005 was then the record time for the race. That succumbed only once in the intervening years, to the great Almond Eye, but her figure was trimmed again as Calandagan rallied to wrest victory close to the line from the home-trained favourite Masquerade Ball in the 17-runner affair.
His time for the 12 furlongs was 2 minutes 20.3 seconds, more than three seconds faster than Found recorded in the quickest-ever Arc for the Aidan O’Brien/Coolmore team in 2016. Just think of it, yesterday’s winner averaged fewer than 12 seconds per furlong (11.67 to be precise) over a mile-and-a-half: not much below sprinting pace!
Thus, after that quartet of second places, it is now four Group One victories in a row - and how - for Calandagan, following the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud in June; the King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot in July; and the Champion Stakes, easily from Ombudsman, again at Ascot in October. Some hound!
https://youtu.be/L5sUW79JlQo?si=hvrngEGBpFCWBQZ0
It took a battling performance from the winner, and the exciting thing for international racing is that the son of Gleneagles – whose 2026 fee has remained at €20k for the forthcoming season - will almost certainly remain in training with the expectation of boosting his already lavish earnings figure.
Yesterday’s version carried a first prize of £2.6 million, but under the race conditions, the King George was one of several incentivised qualifying races which brought an invitation to the race and a £2.3 million bonus for any horse that followed by winning the Japan Cup.
No doubt that possibility had been insured and equally the fact that it had been 20 years since an overseas horse had won, the unlikely eventuality had been largely discounted. Even though he was the best horse in the world on ratings Calandagan was only second best in the market at 11/4. He won’t be as big as that for any race that Graffard chooses to point him at any time soon.
For a Coolmore team still having to adjust to losing their number one Galileo replacement, Wootton Bassett, who died in the early autumn while on his off-season stint in Australia, Gleneagles’ son’s exploits are a reminder that Coolmore is far from a one-sire outfit.
They are almost embarrassingly well-stocked with top-class new sires that entered stud this year and several other high-class performers from the 2025 Classic season that have followed them on.
Mickael Barzalona had to overcome his compatriot Christophe-Patrice Lemaire on the favourite and the pair passed the finish two and a half lengths ahead of third-placed Danon Decile. Lemaire has been riding in the biggest races in Japan combined with his domestic duties for many years and has won the Cup four times, starting with Vodka (2009).
He won twice on Almond Eye (2018, in that record time, and 2020) and also partnered the exceptional Japanese champion Equinox two years ago. Ryan Moore and Oisin Murphy are other top riders to have won the race in recent years, but the last French-trained horse to win was Le Glorieux way back in 1987.
Barzalona has come a long way from that day at the Derby when he started celebrating before passing the line to win for Andre Fabre on Pour Moi in the Michael Tabor colours. That was probably just youthful exuberance, and he has proved himself a top-flight international pilot with increasing regularity since, like a slow-maturing French red wine.
A year after Pour Moi, Brian Meehan booked Barzalona to ride Ray Tooth’s Catfish in the Vodafone Dash on Derby Day and the rather headstrong filly probably lost all chance when her saddle slipped as they left the stalls. Far from making her usual fast start, she was always fighting a lost cause it seemed, with her jockey rather precariously perched.
She rallied to such good effect that she was flying home in third, not much more than a length behind the John Best-trained Stone Of Folca. Stone of Folca won the five-furlong sprint in a time of 53.69 seconds, then and still a record for an electronically timed five-furlong race. How close must Catfish have gone to being the world record holder!
Coincidentally, I was with Raymond and his long-time right-hand man Steve Gilbey on Friday celebrating Steve’s landmark 70th birthday. He certainly doesn’t look it! We love going to the Mandarin Kitchen next to Queensway Station and the food as ever was first class. The talk quickly turned to Constitution Hill’s comeback run in the Fighting Fifth Hurdle the following afternoon and, rather ungraciously, I suggested I thought he would fall.
Nicky Henderson has a wonderful record in the race with nine wins starting from 2001 with Landing Light. His second was Ray’s Punjabi in 2008 when the race was switched to Wetherby while Constitution Hill won it as a five-year-old in 2022, by 12 lengths from smart stable-companion Epatante.
That superb mare was again in second when Constitution Hill won the Christmas Hurdle by 17 lengths next time and had future champion State Man seven lengths adrift when winning his single Champion Hurdle in March 2023.
I was at a Cheltenham Preview on a Saturday evening in March in Central London this year, feeling obliged from the floor to suggest that I reckoned Constitution Hill was the best hurdler I’d ever seen, so why are we even discussing it? Lydia Hislop, one of the panel experts on the evening, was far less sure, citing that his jumping had become much less secure.
Of course, Constitution Hill fell when still in contention four from home on the big day and then State Man, poised for a follow-up to his 2024 success, fell at the last when five lengths clear. It was left to the mare Golden Ace, trained in the West Country by Jeremy Scott, to come through and seize the prize.
Rarely can a winner have been received with such scant praise, but Scott persevered, sending her over to Punchestown where she put in another brave show to follow home State Man for a further lucrative payday as Constitution Hill laboured home a remote fifth.
Runner-up when an odds-on shot and undercooked at Kempton on her return in the autumn, Golden Ace turned up once more in the Fighting Fifth with Jeremy going against the market, this time she was a 22/1 shot. Again, she benefited from others’ failings, Constitution Hill coming down as early as the second flight at Newcastle, and then his market rival, Dan Skelton’s The New Lion having to be rousted when narrowly ahead and falling two from home.
From there, it must be a cakewalk we reckoned for Willie Mullins’ hitherto unbeaten Anzadam, but after being brought with a smooth run by Paul Townend, he was a bit untidy at the last. Meanwhile, Golden Ace under Lorcan Williams, kept going in her usual fashion to win by one and a half lengths with the other outsider Nemean Lion getting within a neck of the runner-up at the line.
It’s hard to get rid of pre-conceptions but to say Golden Ace has been lucky in collecting both of her big prizes is to perhaps forget that this was her seventh win (plus three places) in her 11 starts over hurdles. The hurdles are there to jump and for some reason all the signs from Constitution Hill to his trainer that he was a different horse this year meant nowt. He seemingly restricts his errors to the racecourse.
I was surprised when he went to Punchestown last spring after the Champion Hurdle debacle. I would not be shocked if Nicky and owner Michael Buckley decided to finish him off now before that wonderful career is tarnished further. [Rumour is that he might run on the flat - Ed.]
Over at Newbury, it didn’t take long for Dan Skelton to wipe away the disappointment of The New Lion’s defeat in the Fighting Fifth. Two weeks earlier he had seen a long-laid plan come to fruition when his nine-year-old mare Panic Attack ran away with the Paddy Power Gold Cup over two and a half miles at Cheltenham.
Now, going up six furlongs in distance and carrying a 4lb penalty, she was theoretically 3lb well in after being raised 7lb for Cheltenham. With Dan’s brother Harry riding at Newcastle, 3lb claimer Tristan Durrell took over the reins and the mare skipped easily clear to pick up the £142k first prize. Come on Willie, wake up, Dan might soon be out of sight!
Just as keen on the cuisine of the Mandarin Kitchen are Maurice Manasseh and son David, who were both in Ireland yesterday for the comeback run back over hurdles of part-owner David’s Ballyburn, whose season over fences proved such an anti-climax last winter.
He returned for the Mullins team in the Hatton’s Grace Hurdle and although he didn’t quite prevent previous dual winner Teahupoo’s getting home for the hat-trick, in another stride he would have done. David can look forward to another Cheltenham Festival win, this time in the three-mile championship! He is only a 2/1 shot, but on the day that might look generous.
- TS
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Calandagan_JapanCup_2025.png319830Tony Staffordhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngTony Stafford2025-12-01 07:54:592025-12-01 10:20:34Monday Musings: Woof No More
From time to time, not very often, I buy a horse to syndicate among fellow racing fans and geegeez.co.uk readers. Last week was one such occasion and a few shares are available, more on that in a moment. But first, a little history on geegeez syndicates.
Geegeez Syndicates
I've been involved in racing syndicates since a horse called Love's Design, trained by Julia Feilden, was bought in the year 2000. He was a bit of a legend, winning seven times for us and providing numerous more memorable days on track. Over the intervening 25 years, I've gone from being a syndicate member to being a syndicate member... and manager! Always taking a share myself, we've had a lot of success. In fact, looking at the new OWNER variable in QT (landing very, very soon!), I can see that we've had 42 winners from 295 runners since 2009. That's about one win for every seven runs, and a place rate of better than one in three.
Overall in the UK, the average in that time is around one win in nine, and just lower than three in ten placed; so we've done pretty well since the start.
More recently, however, I've tried to buy better stock, especially over jumps (my main passion). Unsurprisingly, that has usually meant spending a bit more - but not always - and investing earlier. That's rewarded us handsomely, as this next image shows.
Let me point a few things out from that table.
Firstly, our jumps horses over the past five years have won at a rate of almost one in four, 23.08% to be precise. That's more than twice the average win rate (see IV figure, 2.14). They've made the frame almost 44% of the time and have been profitable to back at both BSP and starting price. We've had a lot of fun!
The undisputed flag bearers have been Coquelicot, a dual Listed and nine-time winner in total (also 2nd eight times), from just 28 career starts; and ten-time winning Sure Touch, whose big day was the Summer Plate last year. Total earnings for 'Cookie' were £97,000 before she was sold as a broodmare for £40,000 in January this year; Sure Touch, a winner last month on his most recent start, has amassed £130,593 so far and is being aimed at the veterans' series in the spring.
As an aside, Coquelicot is the joint-winningmost horse Anthony Honeyball has trained, alongside those magnificent veterans Regal Encore and Sam Brown; and Sure Touch is the joint-winningmost horse Olly Murphy has trained, alongside the brilliant Brewin'upastorm. We've been lucky as well as good.
The current team is comprised of Sure Touch, Dartmoor Pirate (rated 118), who we think will nearly win next time before tilting at something a touch more ambitious; and Gee Force Flyer, given an opening mark of 118 and for whom a maiden hurdle ought to be a near formality on his next run: we'll again then map out a route for the rest of the season.
The Pirate was a close up fourth in a G3 handicap hurdle two seasons back, and 5th in another G3 as well as second in a Pertemps qualifier last season. He had a few issues which we think we've sorted now. The Flyer won an Irish point to point which is working out brilliantly - winners everywhere - and has run against two of the smarter UK middle distance novices this season in races that didn't remotely play to his strengths (both were quarter-mile sprints off very slow fractions).
As well as that trio, we have a pair of unraced three-year-old fillies, Ashburton and Luna Lux. Ashburton is a big filly who will probably need a year or two to fully grow into her frame, but she's ready enough to have an outing at Doncaster on Saturday in a juvenile bumper. It's likely more for experience than anything, but she's surprised us a lot at how forward she's been. And Luna Lux, a filly I really love, was ready to run earlier in the month before succumbing to a dose of the snots - very common this time of year, especially with the youngsters. She'll be on track before long and I'm very excited for that!
And now we have one more...*
*incidentally, I buy fillies with good pedigrees not only because there is an excellent race programme for them but also because, even if the racing project doesn't quite work out, they have residual value as broodmares.
The Arqana Autumn sale is one deep in quality with packed pedigrees aplenty and, allied to the success we've had there before, it’s why I’m prepared to swing the bat a little in terms of hammer price. We had such good luck with Coquelicot, who was bought at the 2017 renewal, and we think we have another potential top-notcher from there in Luna Lux, sourced at the 2023 Arqana Autumn Sale.
The Back Story
Since 2017, we were having so much fun with Cookie that we didn’t return to Deauville until two years ago, November 2023, at which Luna Lux raised her pretty little head in our direction. We don’t yet know how that story will play out, but so far so exciting, and she’s developed into a filly of real quality – “a belter” in trainer Anthony Honeyball’s words – who’s lived something of a storied life already. She’s taken us on a journey even before her racecourse debut and that, of course, is the wonderful nature of projects like this.
A side point on Luna Lux is that she is the second foal from her dam, Black Luna; the first foal sold as a three-year-old for €150,000 last June. This is important because I am trying to buy six-figure quality youngstock 'off plan' as it were. If Luna Lux came to market, I'd unhesitatingly expect her to fetch at least £100,000. [It does need to be kept in mind that there are keep costs from November yearling to June 3yo, but nothing like the difference between €50,000 and £100,000, still less €150,000]
To now, and exciting news from that pretty and horse-y enclave in northern France. A filly we (me, Anthony and Tessa Greatrex of Highflyer Bloodstock) loved went through the ring last week, the first of only three on our shortlist. I wasn’t quite up together enough to bid on her at the point she went through but, fortunately, she was bought back by her vendors at €42,000 because they thought she was worth more. They wanted €50,000 and were adamant she wouldn’t leave them for less. She’s an absolute beauty as you'll see in a moment so I can understand why they felt that way.
Anyway, having discounted the second of three on my list and then watched the third one make too much money (she’s a cracker, too, but budget is not infinite!), we were in the strong position of being able to attempt an ‘amiable’: a deal with the vendor post-auction at a price acceptable to both parties. So, the imaginary hammer dropped at €45,000, a full €5,000 less than the vendor wanted but a fair price for them and a value one for us.
The Trainer
She'll be trained at the geegeez-sponsored Potwell Farm Stables of Anthony Honeyball. Anthony is having another excellent season and is on track to again break his personal best, which saw a new high last campaign.
The yard's rude health is not reflected by numbers alone. Honeyball has also been delivering in quality, with the trainer fresh from success at Cheltenham's November meeting and a second success in the Badger Beers a week earlier.
Big winners on big afternoons are becoming the norm for the 45-year-old, who is finding he now has the ammunition to fire more than one bullet at some of the season's more lucrative affairs. Such was the case at Cheltenham this month, where a heartbreaking final-fence blunder from favourite Jordans Cross was made more palatable when his stablemate Kdeux Saint Fray was able to snag the win instead.
Anthony is extremely personable and it's a great pleasure for me that most of his runners sport the geegeez.co.uk logo across the jockey's chests. He is also, more importantly, a brilliant judge of a horse and outstanding at bringing along youngstock to be ready early.
The Filly
Introducing lot 557, an unnamed (our job to name her, when most French yearlings come pre-titled as was the case with Luna Lux) filly by Nirvana du Berlais out of a winning mare from a deep Black Type family. She was an early February foal and she looks forward and racy: she should be ready early all other things being equal.
Let’s talk about that pedigree.
Father
Nirvana du Berlais might not be a name you’re familiar with, but he’s the coming man (in the same way that Masked Marvel was two years ago when I bought Luna Lux - now he's a household name and one of the absolute most sought after stallions in the jumps game).
On the track he was a hurdler himself, winning a Grade 3 and a Grade 1 from just seven starts - all placed bar a debut fall, and the final four in Graded company.
His first crop is just four years old currently, but they include two Grade 1 winners already: the machine that is Lulamba, and Leader Sport, who won a Grade 1 chase the weekend before last in France. The 3rd in that Auteuil G1 was, you guessed it, another notch on the Nirvana du Berlais bed post, this time a filly called Nirvalla.
Keep in mind that he has had very few runners to date and his oldest progeny are not yet five years old!
Here are the past week or so's UK/Ire results for the sire:
Three winners, a second and two thirds - from only seven runners!
But there's also the French winners... the image below shows all of his winners in less than the last six weeks.
Dad, of course, is only half of the gene pool, so what about mum? Her name is Futura, and she was a nine-year-old primetime mare when bearing our filly. On the track Futura won once from just six starts and, since going to the paddocks, she’d had one previous foal: a Goliath du Berlais colt who sold as a foal for €31,000 – and then resold as a 3yo this summer to Venetia Williams for €60,000. It’ll be very interesting to see how he develops.
The second dam, Funny Feerie, was a phenom: she was a dual Listed winner over obstacles before throwing THREE GROUP/GRADE 1 WINNERS, ALL OF WHICH WENT ON TO BE STALLIONS! That’s virtually unheard of.
The pick of them is Fuisse, who won the Group 1Prix du Moulin and was second in the G1 Prix du Jockey Club (French Derby) - all class.
Next is Full Of Gold, who won the 2yo staying (10f) Group 1, the Criterium de Saint-Cloud: precocity and stamina.
And, lest you were thinking it’s a bit too sans obstacles, the third was a full brother to Futura called For Fun. He won the Grade 1 Prix Alain du Breil (2m3f, hurdles), among a further plethora of podiums in Pattern races.
It really is a stacked and loaded pedigree as you can see below:
Nirvana du Berlais is by Martaline, himself a champion sire in France; and Futura is by Motivator, another pre-eminent NH influence. The point is laboured by now, but it’s clearly a wonderful page.
The Filly Herself
All that pedigree counts for nothing if the actual horse to which it relates is too small, walks wrong, has poor conformation, or is otherwise less than perfect. That's how we discounted one of the trio on my final shortlist (and several before her). This filly, as you can see below, walks and trots beautifully.
She has arrived safely at Anthony's yard on the Dorset/Somerset border, had her vaccinations and is now out in a field covered in mud with a couple of other yearlings to keep her company. She's settled in really well and will have a very quiet time of it until the spring.
The Plan / Syndicate
The Plan
So she's in the field for a few months, after which, in spring next year (it's not far off, you know!), she’ll benefit from the full scholarship programme at the Potwell Academy. That involves being broken in (being 'laid over', having a saddle put on, ridden around her box, and then ridden in the indoor school and on the local roads) before being turned out for the summer. After the summer next year, she's likely to continue her education with some trots on the round gallop and building to a gentle trot up the searching Seaborough hill gallop; there will also be some jumping practice next year.
And then, in 2027 - it'll be 2026 in a minute - she'll be ready to race granted normal luck.
The Syndicate
She is being syndicated into ten 10% shares and seven six are available now.
Each share costs £4,500 with monthly fees of £125 starting January 1st 2026, and full training fees of £250/month from spring 2027.
There are no hidden costs - all funds go into the syndicate account and any residue is returned to syndicate members.
Owners benefit from stable visits, a dedicated WhatsApp group with regular updates on progress, and, when the time comes, owners' badges for the races. Of course, each 10% share earns a 10% return on prizemoney and eventual sales proceeds.
She’s an absolutely gorgeous filly with a tremendous page, and a really exciting prospect for the track and beyond. This is a genuine opportunity to be involved with a 'could be anything' project and learn about how a young horse because a racehorse.
What a run for young, up-and-coming French National Hunt sire Nirvana Du Berlais.
The Haras de la Hetraie resident, whose oldest crop of foals are aged only four, supplied Leader Sport, an impressive winner of the Grade 1 Prix Maurice Gillois over fences at Auteuil on Sunday for trainer Daniela Mele and joint-owner Walter Connors, and Nirvalla, who defied odds of 101-1 to finish third in the same race for Mickael Seror.
Nirvana Du Berlais' well-touted son Lulamba, who had already put his sire’s name up in lights by scoring in the Punchestown Champion Four-Year-Old Hurdle after finishing second in the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham last season for Nicky Henderson, then coasted to victory on his chasing debut in a beginners’ event at Exeter on Monday.
To put an exclamation mark on it, Manganese, a three-year-old from the sire’s second crop, overcame significant interference from a loose horse to score easily in a fillies’ juvenile maiden hurdle at Leicester for Max Comley on the same afternoon.
Nirvana Du Berlais’ hot streak didn’t come out of the blue, either. There is supporting evidence to suggest that it is the start of a successful stallion career.
His debut four-year-olds, of which there are 79, also include Semper Fortis, who took a Listed handicap hurdle at Auteuil last month for Noel George and Amanda Zetterholm, and Victory Valley, who finished second in a Listed chase at the same track in April for Arnaud Chaille-Chaille and Francois Pamart, along with 14 other winners and 11 placed performers under rules.
His second generation of three-year-olds, which totals 100, has meanwhile already yielded five other winners besides Manganese. Among those are Nicos Invicta, who struck in an Auteuil hurdle in April and wasn’t beaten far into fifth in a Listed event at the track in September for Francois Nicolle, and Juste Prix, who scored by three lengths over hurdles at Senonnes in August for Isabelle Pacault.
If Nirvana Du Berlais does take his place in the hallowed ranks of elite French National Hunt sires alongside the likes of Doctor Dino, No Risk At All and Cokoriko, as it looks increasingly like he will, it won’t be the biggest surprise. He has always had an awful lot going for him, after all.
First, he has a terrific French jumps pedigree. He is by Martaline, Haras de Montaigu’s much-missed son of Linamix who is the source of numerous stars on either side of the Channel and another big-race winner in Marble Sands at Cheltenham on Sunday.
Martaline’s other sons at stud include Beaumec De Houelle, who is one crop ahead of Nirvana Du Berlais but hasn’t made nearly as explosive a start, although it does look like he has a good one on his hands in Letos, the brave winner of the Brown Lad Handicap Hurdle at Naas this month for Tony Mullins.
Nirvana Du Berlais is, furthermore, out of Katioucha, a daughter of Mansonnien who finished third in the Listed Prix Finot hurdle at Auteuil for newcomers and is now developing into a real blue hen for her owner Haras du Berlais and partners.
She is the dam of five other winners, including Toscana Du Berlais, a son of Shantou who struck by six lengths in the Grade 1 Prix la Haye Jousselin at Auteuil on Sunday; Triana Du Berlais, a daughter of Presenting who scored at Grade 3 level over hurdles and fences at Auteuil; and Aubusson, a son of Ballingarry who was saddled by Nick Williams to take a Grade 3 handicap hurdle at Haydock and to finish a nose second behind Thousand Stars in the Grade 1 Grand Prix d'Automne at Auteuil.
Nice To Meet You, a placed full-sister to Nirvana Du Berlais, has meanwhile produced dual Auteuil Listed chase winner and Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris fourth Niko Has (by Great Pretender) and last season’s young French hurdling ace Nietzsche Has (Zarak), who showed his prowess to British racegoers when he bolted up by eight lengths in the Grade 2 Finale Juvenile Hurdle at Chepstow last December.
Nietzsche Has received an enthusiastic reception in his first season at Montaigu this year, covering 102 mares in total, and his supporters will no doubt be delighted to see his ‘uncle’ Nirvana Du Berlais showing it to be a sire-producing family.
There is quality all the way down this page, too. Katioucha is a half-sister to high-class French exports Ma Filleule and Mon Parrain out of Kadaina, a daughter of Kadalko who won a Listed hurdle at Auteuil.
Kadiana was in turn one of five black type-winning jumpers out of the Lyfko mare Kogina, along with Katoune, Klark, Madame Stella and Samson. Madame Stella is the dam of Waitnsee, who won the Imperial Call Chase at Cork four years ago.
Nirvana Du Berlais then lived up to that outstanding breeding in his seven outings for Chaille-Chaille, all over hurdles at Auteuil at three. He won twice, in the Grade 3 Prix Aguado and Grade 1 Prix Cambaceres, on the latter occasion surging 14 lengths clear of the classy pair Kool Has and For Fun.
Nirvana Du Berlais has the good looks to match, being a powerful sort standing 16.2½ hands, although he’s somehow overcome being born chestnut, a towering obstacle to siring talented jumpers in Britain and Ireland. Apparently.
It is no surprise, then, that he has always received strong support from breeders. He covered books numbering 125 and 131 mares in his first two seasons, and word must have spread about the appearance of his early foals as he was sent 185 mares in his third year, 189 in his fourth and 160 in his fifth.
With Lulamba having dropped a big clue in the winter that Nirvana Du Berlais’ progeny have the ability to match their looks, the sire covered a bumper book of 211 mares in his sixth season this year, including quite a few notable names in British or Irish ownership such as Maria’s Benefit, Stormy Ireland and The Glancing Queen.
This year’s Weatherbys Return of Mares also features nine foals by him registered in Britain or Ireland in 2025. Take a bow, the breeders of those horses, for being so ahead of the game: Elms Bloodstock; Scarlett Knipe; Longner Bloodstock and Peel Bloodstock; JP King and Patrick Turley; Phil and Jan Mathias; Olney Bloodstock; Scandinavian Equine Services; and Evergreen Bloodstock – twice, so that outfit must be doubly shrewd.
King and Turley have already received their reward, selling their Nirvana Du Berlais colt foal out of the Grade 2-placed Helissio mare Our Dot’s Baby to Dick Frisby for €68,000 at the Tattersalls Ireland November National Hunt Sale this month.
Knipe is selling her colt out of Lucie Du Berlais, a Saint Des Saints mare from another black-type-packed Berlais family, in the unusual arena of the Tattersalls December Foal Sale in Newmarket next Wednesday. Such a well-bred offering is unlikely to be missed among the Flat bluebloods, though.
Several of the other British and Irish-bred Nirvana Du Berlais foals feature among the eight lots by the sire set to be presented at the Goffs December National Hunt Sale next month, alongside the inevitable French pinhooks. They will no doubt be even more closely examined by traders and end users after the exploits of Leader Sport, Lulamba and co.
Pinhookers certainly seemed keen to lay their hands on Nirvana Du Berlais yearlings at the Arqana Autumn Sale in Deauville yesterday, with Carrigeen Bloodstock paying €30,000 for one colt and Brown Island Stables giving €16,000 for another.
It might prove wise to have bred to the sire before now, with his 2026 covering fee still to be announced but sure to go up, and to buy his stock before everyone else jumps on the bandwagon.
It is still early days for Nirvana Du Berlais, but he looks like the real deal to me.
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/nirvana7.png4371154Matt Bisognohttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngMatt Bisogno2025-11-26 14:17:342025-11-26 16:36:59New Racing Syndicate: Seeking Nirvana?
We know that trainers have their own personalised methods of training horses, as well as how they go about placing horses in terms of which races they are going to run in, writes Dave Renham. In this article I will examine the records of certain trainers in terms of the distance they travel with their runners to the racecourse.
Introduction
Clearly, the location of training facilities impacts where the racecourses are in relation to the racing yard; trainers that train in Scotland for example are somewhat restricted in terms of short journeys to courses. Nick Alexander, who trains in Fife, has two courses within 40 miles (Musselburgh and Perth), and he still has to travel more than 90 miles to get to the other two Scottish tracks, Ayr and Kelso. Compare this to Nigel (and Willy) Twiston-Davies, Fergal O’Brien and Kim Bailey to name but three, who all train within 40 miles of six different racecourses.
In terms of data for this piece I have looked at UK National Hunt racing from 1st January 2019 to 11th November 2025. Any profit/losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) less 2% commission.
How a journey impacts a horse is hard to say. Logically, we could argue that the less time the horse has to travel the better: there's less chance for it to become unsettled on the journey and such like. However, the counter argument would be that for a trainer to send a horse on a very long journey there must be a good reason. There are a few situations in which a trainer might look further afield including more suitable race conditions, a less competitive looking race, targeting a specific prize, or looking to increase the profile of the horse or indeed the yard by entering at bigger meetings. There are also cases when the owners might want to run somewhere, either because it's convenient for them or because of any associated prestige/good day out. Trainers' and owners' intentions are not always 100% aligned!
When considering how a horse is likely to fare on a shorter or longer journey to the track, I am hoping that digging into individual trainers will help to give some answers. My assumption is that each trainer will be different with some trainers primarily targeting races close to home, whereas others happier to travel the length and breadth of the country in search of what they deem to be better opportunities.
My approach will be to first look at distances of 40 miles and less to the racecourse, as most of these journeys involve a horse travelling for about an hour or less. I will then look at runners travelling distances of 175 miles or more, which I estimate means a minimum journey time of around four hours given the likely vehicle speed restrictions.
40 miles or less
I'll begin by looking at shorter journeys to the track, and below are the figures for all trainers combined when travelling 40 miles or less to the racecourse:
This gives us a benchmark to use as a comparison when looking at individual trainers. Below is a list of the all trainers who saddled at least 250 runners in total with travel of 40 miles or less from stable to racecourse. I have restricted qualifiers to horses that were a BSP price of 12.0 or less in order to try and avoid potential skewed profits from huge-priced winners. The table is ordered by Betfair SP Return on Investment.
21 of the 36 trainers made a profit with their runners priced BSP 12.0 or less, while 23 had A/E indices of over 1.00. A few handlers stand out, namely Rebecca Menzies, James Moffatt, Ben Pauling and Matt Sheppard. All four secured excellent profits over the timeframe. Looking in more detail at the record of Rebecca Menzies, there are three courses within 40 miles of her stables and her breakdown for each was as follows:
Profits at all three with the Newcastle record being particularly strong. What is also worth noting is her consistency year on year with these runners. The graph below shows Menzies' yearly win strike rates in this context:
Every year has seen a win rate better than one in five and in addition to this she recorded a blind profit in every year.
There are six tracks within 40 miles of Ben Pauling's yard, and he secured a profit at five of these. His record at Worcester was particularly impressive with 21 wins from 75 (SR 28%) for a profit of £37.37 (ROI +49.8%). He has been a rare visitor to Ludlow but of his 20 runners there, eight won (SR 40%) for a profit of £15.25 (ROI +76.3%).
All of James Moffatt’s qualifiers raced at Cartmel, while Matt Sheppard made a profit at four nearby courses - Hereford, Ludlow, Stratford and Worcester.
Moving on to some of the ‘big guns’, Nicky Henderson’s record looks quite modest for him but, to be fair, the only courses within 40 miles are Ascot and Newbury, two tough tracks at which to attain profitability. Like Henderson, the yard of Paul Nicholls has only two courses within 40 miles, Taunton and Wincanton. Nicholls has hit a strike rate of over 30% at both with his runners priced BSP 12.0 or less, Taunton producing a small positive return of just under 10 pence in the pound.
Dan Skelton has six courses within 40 miles (Cheltenham, Hereford, Stratford, Warwick, Wolverhampton and Worcester) but only Hereford has seen a positive return with these shorter priced runners. His record there was 26 wins from 69 (SR 37.7%) for a profit of £26.50 (ROI +38.4%). However, with favourites across all six courses Skelton has done well thanks to 122 winners from 286 (SR 42.7%) for a profit of £25.95 (ROI +9.1%). With those market leaders he has proved profitable across the three main race types and the BSP ROI percentages for each race type are shown below.
As can be seen, he has fared especially well with favourites ‘on the level’ in NH flat races/bumpers, returning nearly 19 pence in the £.
Before moving on, let me share the trainers who have secured returns of over 10% (10p in the £) with horses that started in the top three in the betting when travelling 40 miles or less. The graph below shows the 11 who made the cut:
It is perhaps no surprise to see Messrs Moffatt, Pauling and Sheppard in the line up based on the earlier data, and it may also be interesting that none of the perceived big guns make the list. From a punting perspective I feel it always gives us an edge when some of the lesser-known trainers have potentially profitable angles to exploit.
175 miles or more
As we did with the shorter distances, let me set the scene by sharing the overall figures for all UK NH trainers who travelled 175 miles or more to race. The total number of qualifiers is roughly half of those in the '40 or less' group which is no surprise:
We see a higher strike rate than the 'short distance travelled' group, but almost double the losses. Here, backing all runners blind would have cost us 8.3p in the £ compared with 4.4p with the other group.
As before, when looking at individual trainers I will be using a price cap of BSP 12.0. To qualify for this list, trainers needed to have had at least 100 qualifiers within this price bracket, and I have again sorted the table by BSP ROI:
This time, only 11 of 34 trainers made a profit with their runners priced BSP 12.0 or less, while 13 had A/E indices of over 1.00. These percentages of 'positive' trainers are not as good compared with what we saw earlier. In general, at this juncture, it does seem that a shorter trip to the course has been preferable to a longer one. Of course, not all trainers have had enough qualifiers to make both lists but, for those who have, I have produced a comparison of their data at the end of the article.
Looking at trainers with positive records with long distance travellers, Laura Morgan’s figures have been extremely impressive. Her record during this timeframe was particularly good when she sent runners to Scotland: such entries (BSP 12.0 or less) combined to win 34 of the 101 races (SR 36.7%) for a healthy profit of £64.05 to £1 level stakes. Returns equated to over 63 pence in the £. The majority of her Scottish raiders travelled to Perth, but all four courses north of the border returned a profit as the table below shows:
It seems that any of Morgan's runners heading to Scotland in the near future demand close scrutiny, unless the market suggests otherwise.
Paul Nicholls was another trainer to make a blind profit during this timeframe with longer travellers. When stable jockey Harry Cobden was on board the record was even better hitting a strike rate of close to 37% (82 winners from 222) for a profit of £58.36 (ROI +26.3%). They combined to ride at least 20 times at four different courses – Aintree, Ayr, Musselburgh and Southwell – and all four produced decent returns. Indeed, when we examine the value metric (A/E index) at these four courses, we see that the runners proved to be outstanding value.
In terms of other big names, Dan Skelton, like Morgan, has performed well when sending runners to Scotland. His raiders have provided returns of over 23p in the £ thanks to a strike rate of nearly 32%. Nicky Henderson rarely sends runners to Scotland, especially Kelso, Musselburgh and Perth. However, he has had five winners from nine at Kelso, three from four at Musselburgh, and four from eight at Perth. Returns combined at these three courses were over 50p in the £.
Finally, in this section, let me share the trainers who had the best records with long travellers sent off in the top three in the betting. Five managed ROI percentages of over 10% and these are shown in the table below:
Short vs Long: A Comparison
The last thing I want to do is compare trainers who had enough qualifying runners to make both main tables, short and long. Obviously, readers can look at the separate tables above, but having the key figures next to each other is more convenient. I have used the following metrics: win percentage, ROI% and A/E indices. ROIs that were negative are coloured in red; what I deem to be positive stats are highlighted in blue:
This table helps to highlight some potentially useful pointers such as Henderson, Lacey and Murphy’s stronger records with longer travellers; compared with Pauling, Team Twiston-Davies, Evan Williams and Venetia Williams who all have much better records with horses running closer to home.
I hope this article has offered up some interesting and useful facts and figures that we can take advantage of over the coming months. With trainers we need to be aware that ‘one cap does not fit all’, and I believe the more we dig into individual trainer records the better.
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/LauraMorgan_MarketRasen.png318830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2025-11-25 15:22:432025-11-26 11:16:59NH Trainers: Short vs Long Distance Travellers
When you happen to be 78 years of age and own a racehorse that not only is the best you’ve ever had but also could be a future steeplechase champion, it’s hard not to be impatient, writes Tony Stafford. It must have been excruciating for Harry Redknapp to have to wait 331 days for his hitherto unbeaten young chaser The Jukebox Man to make his reappearance over the weekend after injury kept him away from last March’s big spring festivals.
The year before, The Jukebox Man and his trainer Ben Pauling had tried valiantly to keep the Irish at bay with second places at both Cheltenham and Aintree. He got to within a head of the Gordon Elliott-trained Stellar Story – no relation Wilf! – at Cheltenham, then was five and a half lengths behind Mullins’ Dancing City at Aintree, but more than seven lengths ahead of third-placed Cherie D’Am for Dan Skelton.
The two novice chases he contested last winter were comfortably annexed. First, he dropped to 2m4f for a Grade 2 at Newbury and beat Alan King’s Masaccio a couple of lengths before winning Kempton’s big Christmas novice chase, the three-mile Kauto Star with another similarly controlled performance.
So now it was Haydock and an Intermediate Chase over an intermediate distance of 2m5.5f, but that track takes plenty of stamina and jumping prowess. Again, the margin was modest, once more a couple of lengths, but Ben Jones always had everything under control and the Greenall/Guerrerio-trained and J P McManus-owned Iroko is no ordinary horse to brush aside.
His last run before Saturday was a few miles west along the East Lancs Road at Aintree where he started as the 13/2 favourite for the Grand National and finished a creditable fourth. Iroko predictably kept galloping all the way to the line under Jonjo junior’s urgings on Saturday but never looked like getting to the winner.
The King George, which would be a Boxing Day return to Kempton for Harry’s horse, is the hope but as a former much-respected manager of Tottenham Hotspur and other football clubs, he knows well that injuries to man or horse can happen at any time.
He was talking with friends about his increased involvement in racing on Champions Day at Ascot last month. And it was clear that it was fingers crossed that nothing would go wrong before Haydock. It didn’t, and now there’s no doubt this Poplar-born phenomenon has no wish to slow down, kept solid by his 58-year marriage to Sandra.
There must be something about a working-class upbringing in that part of East London that instils permanency. <I started life a few miles north of there at Hackney Wick in the early days after World War 2>. My mate Harry Taylor beat me by a few months, half a mile away and he celebrated an 80th birthday bash with friends and his lovely family on Saturday afternoon.
Organised as ever, I’d lost the original invitation but checked with him on Saturday morning. “Yes, it’s Northwick Park Golf Course.” Rain made the journey tortuous but once I got to the place, near Harrow in West London, my phone’s Maps feature sent me to a golf venue of sorts. I went inside, asked at reception where was the party and I was directed to a room hosting an Indian wedding! The food smelled great, but I thought I’d better persevere.
Harry had me going around in circles up and down the roads around the massive Northwick Park Hospital, once saying “I know where you are!” and I was just about to give best when his grandson Connor called on Harry’s phone. “It’s at a different golf club, near where we live in Harpenden <that’s Hertfordshire!>. You should make it in an hour!” I did and loved the Englebert Humperdinck tribute guy. If only school mate Tony Peters (my exact birth twin, formerly known as Zahl) had been there; he’s been doing unwitting tributes to the singer for years!
A much more venerable son of that part of East London is 92-year-old Bill Gredley, who while still very active with flat-racing home-bred horses from his well-established operation at Stetchworth Park Stud in Newmarket, has also developed a formidable jumps team. Almost everything nowadays is in training with James Owen. Tim Gredley, Bill’s son, after a spell riding as he modestly says, “Rolls Royces in point-to-points, I didn’t need to be much good!” is back with his first love and is hoping to get into the Great Britain show-jumping team for the next Olympics.
A much better-known veteran of show jumping obviously has a major connection with the foremost UK jumps training operation. Nick Skelton, for decades one of the best show jumping riders in the world and winner of a gold medal at the London Olympics in 2012, was at the time finalising plans for his sons’ burgeoning enterprise in Warwickshire.
That has become extremely powerful and their Grey Dawning, the impressive winner of Haydock’s Betfair Gold Cup an hour or so after The Jukebox Man’s romp, looks very over-priced to me at 16/1 for the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Day after day, illustrations of the skills of three recent champion jockeys, in order Harry Skelton, Harry Cobden and the latest Sean Bowen are offered to an admiring public. All three can be devastating, especially when riding waiting races, to the extent they often don’t get involved in their winning races until many in the stands have probably already given up. Grey Dawning on Saturday just breezed up (to coin a cliché) to last year’s winner Royale Pagaille, drew alongside and then won with a fair amount in hand. How much, you’d have to ask Harry?
This performance will have added to the Redknapp/Pauling team’s confidence in The Jukebox Man as runner-up Iroko had been second to the Skelton horse in his pre-National warm-up at Kelso last March.
Royale Pagaille also took plenty of beating as a horse with four Haydock wins. Before you say that surely as an 11-year-old his powers might be fading, that’s not to understand Venetia Williams’ training, especially of her experienced chasers.
In Horses In Training 2025, her 79-strong stable had 18 horses aged ten or older and another 22 age eight or nine. Don’t be shocked if the softer ground we’re getting heralds a characteristic midwinter bonanza for the Hereford handler.
Talking of venerable phenomena, Willie Mullins, having been putting his feet up over in Ireland after his killer pounce on the Breeders’ Cup, eased back into action with a nice little Euro 88k for the Morgiana Hurdle at Punchestown.
It wasn’t that surprising an outcome. Lossiemouth, in making it eight Grade 1 wins in her career, started 5/1 on for the four-horse affair. The one surprise was that the nine-length runner-up, collecting €28k was not the second favourite and Mullins second string Irancy in the McManus colours, but Glen Kiln, a 28/1 shot trained by David Harry Kelly. Some turn for him!
Lossiemouth is around 3/1 for the Champion Hurdle but we’re waiting to see what Nicky Henderson and Constitution Hill will have to say about that in Newcastle’s Fighting Fifth Hurdle on Saturday.
Mullins also won the beginners’ chase on the Punchestown card with odds-on Kitzbuhel, running for the first time since he put eight grand into the Mullins coffers for his third place on the final day of the season at Sandown last April. The way Dan Skelton’s going, though, I doubt there will be as much in it at the finish this time around between the respective powerhouses of the UK and Ireland – or even that the result will be the same way around.
- TS
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/TheJukeboxMan_Haydock_2025.png319830Tony Staffordhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngTony Stafford2025-11-24 06:07:372025-11-24 06:07:37Monday Musings: It’s Hard to Wait
Top ten front running biases in handicap chases, Part 2 – 5 to 1
In this second article of two, I will be sharing what I believe to be the Top Five run style biases in handicap chases in the UK and Ireland, writes Dave Renham. In the first article, which you can read here, I revealed positions 10 down to 6; they all had very strong biases towards front runners. The five shared below I feel have been even more advantageous to early leaders.
I have used data for handicap chases only as they tend to offer more robust data; and I have gathered data from 2018 to 2024 with no minimum runner consideration. To assist with the correlation I have used two tools from this site, namely the Pace Analyser and the Query Tool. Having access to them is a huge benefit to Gold membership in my opinion.
The run style / pace data on Geegeez is split into four - Led, Prominent, Mid Division and Held Up. A quick recap of the four run styles:
Led – essentially horses that lead early, usually within the first furlong or so; or horses that dispute or fight for the early lead.
Prominent – horses that lay up close to the pace just behind the leader(s).
Mid Division – horses that race mid pack.
Held Up – horses that are held up at, or near the back of the field.
OK, let me kick on starting with number five.
5 Kelso 2m5½f-2m6½f
We start in the Scottish borders at Kelso, essentially over a trip of 2m6f. They sometimes race over a half furlong more or less then 2m6f. The stats for 2018 to 2024 were as follows:
Strong prominent stats make this a course where a position at or near the front early has been a huge advantage. There were slightly stronger Led stats at some other course and distance combinations that I looked at last week but, for me, the additional strength of the prominent figures cemented a very robust overall run style bias.
Horses trying to mount their challenges from off the pace have really struggled over the past few years here, as the win and placed stats clearly show. The struggles of horses racing off the pace early can be highlighted further when sharing the PRB stats. PRB stands for ‘Percentage of Rivals Beaten’.
I grouped the Mid Div and Held Up stats together; their figure of 0.40 (40% of rivals beaten) is a poor one and, to coin a phrase, ‘well off the pace’.
The bias to horses up with or close to the front was stronger on good or firmer ground, or at least the stats suggested this:
17 of the 20 races were won by either early leaders or prominent racers. The 'Led' A/E of 1.87 indicates that front runners were very good value on better ground during this timeframe.
Having started in Scotland we now travel south to Cheltenham.
4 Cheltenham 2m4f–2m5f
It is the middle distance range again, around the 2m4f mark, at Cheltenham (both courses, Old and New, combined). Perhaps not a track that initially would scream out front running bias, but the stats were very strong:
The comparison that caught my eye was the Led versus Held Up win ratios. Front runners won 26 races from just 96 runners, while Hold Ups won just seven from 260! If we had been able to predict the front runner(s) pre-race we would have made a fortune to SP, let alone BSP. Even backing each way would have been extremely profitable.
On good or quicker ground the bias seemed to strengthen as these stats suggest:
Of the 20 races with 15+ runners, just one win was achieved by a hold up horse from 114 qualifiers. The bias has still been strong on easier ground but not as strong.
Onto the PRBs (all going conditions):
I had expected a slightly higher Led PRB based on the placed stats but they have still been comfortably the best. A higher PRB would have probably edged this track/trip further up the list.
Finally, I felt the stats for races with bigger fields (10+ runners) were worth sharing:
Front runners have offered huge value in these races (A/E index 2.53), with potential returns to BSP of nearly 200%!
There have been 11 races so far this year, with just a single win from 16 front runners. However, they have had three further placed horses including a place BSP of 37.55!
3 Tramore 1m7f-2m
The Irish course of Tramore may not be that familiar to some UK punters but run style stats for handicap chases over the 1m7f/2m trip there are well worth sharing:
Yes, the sample size was relatively small but it was potent in favour of front runners with an extremely high A/E index at 1.79 and IV of 2.56. The PRBs correlate strongly and underscore the bias:
The 0.64 figure for front runners, compared with 0.42 for Mid Div/Held Up runners, over this timeframe indicated that the edge was huge. The big advantage of PRB figures is that they effectively help to make small datasets bigger. In racing we often deal with modest sample sizes, relative to what general statistics would consider so at any rate. Hence, when we then try to discern knowledge from the data by using PRBs we are examining all the runners in all the races, rather than just the winners and/or the placed horses. It's not a perfect metric - what is? - but it adds depth to shallow cohorts.
For the record, of the four qualifying races held in 2025 to date, two have been won from the front, at odds of 7/2 (BSP 4.99) and 6/1 (8.2). A third front runner in that quartet was still leading when unshipping his jockey five out.
2 Killarney 2m4f-2m5f
Staying in Ireland for number two, we head to Killarney over 2m4f-2m5f (use 2m4f when using the Pace Analyser / Query Tool):
The Led group of runners hit 2.14 in terms of A/E index and 2.88 in terms of IV. There was a huge 58.6% placed figure to boot. Horses that were held up managed a place percentage of just 13.3%. As with Tramore the sample size was relatively small so let me share the PRB figures:
The 0.66 figure for the Led group compared with 0.39 for Mid Div/Held Up runners helps to confirm the huge front running edge there has been over the past few seasons.
Each year we mighgt reasonably expect four or five qualifying races, which is fewer than ideal, but when they do occur they are races we need to try and take advantage of.
And now for my number 1...
1 Uttoxeter 2m4f-2m5f
Top spot goes to Uttoxeter and its mid-range handicap chases. The majority of races were at 2m4f, but a handful were contested over an extra furlong. These are grouped together in Geegeez (using the 2m4f distance) and stats were as follows:
There were over 100 races in the sample, making this set of data extremely robust. Front runners won better 31% from within their group, had strong metrics across the board and potential profit levels were high. Front runners and prominent racers won 73% of the 112 races from 46% of the runners; and front runners alone won 38% of the races from just 16% of the runners!
The PRBs confirmed the pattern:
The front running edge is clear to see by looking at the bars on the graph, especially noteworthy due to the large number of races at this course and distance.
Ground conditions have made little difference with the win rate for front runners on good or firmer being 32.2%, while on good to soft or softer it was 30.8%.
At the time of writing, 2025 had seen 14 such races of which seven were won from the front.
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Incredibly, run style bias in NH racing is something that still goes under the radar for many punters. There are not many clear-cut edges we can still get as punters these days, but knowing which course and distance combinations offer the strongest biases will almost force us to improve our bottom line.
Until next time...
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Mysteree.jpg320627Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2025-11-18 18:09:302025-11-18 18:09:30Top 10 Front Running Biases in Handicap Chases, Part 2: 5 to 1
It's getting darker earlier, and there's a distinct chill in the air this week. The turf flat season is a fading memory and close at hand now is the National Hunt season proper as well as a serious programme of all-weather racing. Both make for excellent punting!
While it might seem like we've been quiet on the development front this year, we've actually added some big (and small) features in 2025.
The TRENDS tab was introduced in January, and has become part of my 'go to' considerations for a race.
In April, we rolled out Betfair data (Betfair SP, Place SP, in running high and low prices) across the site.
And in September we added 'AvOR', the average official rating of each race, to help you compare today's race quality with runners' recent outings.
You'll also have noticed this year that parts of the site have had a 'facelift' - updating them to be easier on the eye as well as instructive to your wagering.
And we're not done yet!
We're currently working on some further Query Tool updates, as well as more costmetic upgrades. Allow me to show you a few things from the development site.
Query Tool
We'd originally decided on a small number of new variables in QT to release as soon as possible... but once we started digging we found a few technical elements that ideally needed improving. That has delayed release unfortunately, but I'm still able to show you a couple of bits here.
New Variables
We've added some new variables for you to interrogate. These are:
Season
You'll soon be able to search by season, across flat, all-weather, and National Hunt seasons in both UK and Ireland. This is great for analysing, for example, trainers' and jockeys' progression (or regression!) and - especially for the non-flat seasons, where things are not aligned to calendar year - looking at overall stats more generally.
Below for example I've selected the trainer Anthony Honeyball, whose yard geegeez.co.uk sponsors and with whom we syndicate a number of horses, and 'grouped by' season (having only selected UK and NH race types - Anthony has also had flat winners and winners in Ireland during this time).
Anthony Honeyball stats by season
Owner
You'll also be able to drill down by owner before long. And, because some ownership entities have, literally, hundreds of ownership names, we've added a 'select all' button within the search facility. Here's an example using the geegeez.co.uk ownership entities. You'll be able to dig in the weeds of J P McManus, the Ballydoyle cartel, and/or anyone else you fancy.
Racing Post Rating and RPR Rank / Topspeed and TS Rank
And we've added Racing Post Rating and Topspeed, as well as RPR/TS Rank within a race (e.g. RPR rank 1 means the top rated horse on Racing Post Ratings). This image shows the top two ranked Topspeed horses' collective performance over the past two years in UK handicap hurdle/chase races. This is bound to include some big-priced winners skewing the data, but it's not a bad starting point for further analysis by any means!
PRB
The eagle-eyed may have noticed that we've added a new column on the right hand side of the results output in Query Tool for PRB (Percentage of Rivals Beaten). This is a very useful metric, especially for smaller sample sizes, where a number from around 0.55 (55% of rivals beaten) is a positive, and anything below (0.45) is somewhat of a negative. It's definitely a number to keep an eye out for when creating your QT Angles.
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A New Look for the Reports
As well as QT upgrades, we're also working on our report suite and, specifically, on making it a little more modern in look (the data remains the same excellent content you're already familiar with). They'll look like this:
Timeline for Implementation
I've already got this wrong once, which is annoying/embarrassing, and so I'm loth to make the same mistake again. However, I'd be very hopeful they'll appear on your screens - the report changes at least - by the end of the month.
Query Tool upgrades should be an early Christmas present, expect them online in the first half of December with a following wind.
And... in January, we'll be kicking off the New Year in style. More on that another day.
Thanks as ever for being a geegeez subscriber, it means a huge amount to me - to all of us - and it enables us to continue to invest in your racing site. Thanks again!
In this game it’s never too late, writes Tony Stafford. As the rain poured down rendering Saturday’s Cheltenham card in jeopardy after an awful drowning Friday, one Irish trainer was firmly keeping his fingers crossed that the much-vaunted drainage system of Prestbury Park would pass muster.
It did, enabling both the Saturday and Sunday cards to proceed, indeed in slightly less testing ground conditions than expected. While overall the meeting was a glittering triumph for the Dan Skelton yard, it will forever live in the memory of Tom Cooper, a veteran journeyman Irish trainer with 37 years in the game as a licence holder.
Suppose you had been training horses for that length of time and had reached double figures only twice, it would obviously have been something of a struggle, as it is for so many trainers. Overall, those 37 campaigns have yielded 121 wins with just the two from 12 individual horses this year. That was Tom Cooper’s story before Saturday, but two days at Cheltenham over the weekend have pushed away a lot of that endless toil.
Tom was undeniably best known for a while as the father of Bryan Cooper, who in his late teens and early 20s was one of the fastest rising stars of the Irish weighing room. He had the privilege, earned by precocious skill, to ride many top horses including Don Cossack, Apple’s Jade and the 15-length 2016 Triumph Hurdle winner, Our Conor.
In that season of 2015/16, he won 94 races in Ireland, his best score, and his mounts earned more than €2.2 million. His career entered a gradual slowdown before he retired from the saddle at the age of 30 in March 2023.
Tom Cooper had sent horses across to England in 30 of those 37 seasons, winning twice from 50 runs in all. Back home his 12 individual runners in 2025/26 had picked up two first prizes earning a total of €25k.
It’s funny how luck can turn on such a knife-edge. As the crowds left Cheltenham last night, Tom Cooper had not only doubled his entire UK career win score but exceeded his Irish earnings for the season to date by notching two wins from his only UK runners of the year so far.
I say so far advisedly, as both Saturday’s successful 4yo filly Celestial Tune and yesterday’s gelding Saint Clovis are guaranteed to be back for more. Saturday’s winner cost €80k at Tattersalls Ireland in the summer of last year, the bid signed for by Bryan Cooper. She was one of the two Tom Cooper winners in Ireland this season, by nine-and-a-half lengths at Listowel in late September.
Saint Clovis was much more modestly priced at €22k, but the style of his win will have had those big-money operators swirling around. Easy Cheltenham Listed bumper winners do not grow on trees, and such are the resources of those owners at the top of the game, it sometimes can appear that their money does. Expect Tom and probably Bryan’s phones to start ringing – no doubt they already have – though owner Andrew Brooks likely has enough pennies to fend off all but the most tempting of suitors.
Cooper junior also signed the ticket for his father’s other winner this season: the filly Amen Kate was successful at 3/1 on for a Galway maiden hurdle last time out. When Celestial Tune followed up the win on home soil with that taking success on Saturday under Sean Bowen, she was paying a healthy compliment to one of Saint Clovis’s yesterday opponents.
He had finished second in a big field behind Gavin Cromwell’s Bud Fox, so it was understandable with the close at hand endorsement, that he should lead the market.
But it fell to another UK champion jockey, this time Harry Cobden, who sent the Cooper four-year-old to the front, never to be headed. The near five-length margin was being stretched all the way to the line. Bud Fox looked to be galloping all over the winner turning for home, but he ran out of puff up the hill and had to be content with third. Maybe something is not quite right with the Cromwell horses just now, their score of 1 from 51 in the past fortnight – and three from 107 in the last 30 days – miles down on longer-term strike rates.
Saint Clovis is regally bred by jumping standards. His sire Clovis De Berlais was a high-class performer in France and sired Friday’s last-race winner French Emperor. That five-year-old put in a massive performance under top-weight for Somerset trainer Nicky Martin and the Bradley Partnership.
*
When people take a view on a purchase at the sales aiming at resubmitting their buy at a future auction, there is often a salutary lesson to be learned. But Sam Haggas, son of William and Maureen, has inherited some very positive genes from his parents (not to mention grandfather Lester Piggott) as his recent exploits in the New Zealand sales ring bear out.
Last January he joined with two pals, Adam Potts of BBA Ireland and Barry Donoghue’s BMD Bloodstock, to buy a colt by the dual hemisphere sire Hello Youmzain. It was before the stallion became champion New Zealand first season sire, and he also had an excellent year with his progeny in Europe.
The trio paid NZ $90k and after a very fast 200-metre breeze at the Ready To Run sale, received an eye-watering NZ $700k. He was bought to race in Hong Kong.
You’ve probably noticed that there hasn’t been any flat racing for a few days but that hasn’t stopped Karl Burke or George Scott from adding to their already impressive 2025 records.
Burke supplied the favourite and winner, the seven-year-old gelding Royal Champion, to collect the £480,000 first prize for the £1 million Bahrain International Trophy on Friday over ten furlongs, ridden by James Doyle. Joseph O’Brien’s Galen (Dylan Browne McMonagle) and Charlie Appleby’s Military Order (William Buick) followed him home, also for some chunky place money.
Scott clocked up a best 43 wins in the UK but expanded his overseas challenges to such an extent that he won eight notable prizes, the most prestigious being the Prix du Cadran with Caballo de Mar at Longchamp and last weekend’s Group 1 in Munich, the Grosser Allianz Preis von Bayern, with Bay City Roller.
The latter, a three-year-old, had been sent across to Longchamp for three important races this summer/autumn but had to be content with place money each time. That clearly was a disappointment after his unbeaten sequence in a trio of juvenile starts, but the seven-length victory in Munich has brought its reward with a stallion job next year.
*
Finally, I am most disappointed that I cannot fulfil a long-planned visit to Plumpton today. The course’s owner, Peter Savill, is dedicating the meeting to his late daughter Charlotte who died at the tragically young age of 22 having suffered uncomplainingly with fibrolamellar liver cancer.
Peter explains that FLC is one of many lesser known but highly aggressive cancers mainly affecting young people that get little attention from major pharma companies. It leaves families and generous sponsors to provide support.
The day is aimed to bring attention to the disease and even if, like me, you could not manage to get to Plumpton for its early start today, you can call the team at Plumpton on 01273 890383 to donate.
- TS
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/TomCooper_trainer_BryanCooper_jockey_agent.png319830Tony Staffordhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngTony Stafford2025-11-17 07:47:582025-11-17 07:54:38Monday Musings: Just Like That, Cooper’s Back
The Top 10 front running biases in handicap chases Part 1 – 10 to 6
Over the next two articles I will share what I believe to be the Top Ten current run style handicap chase front running biases in the UK and Ireland, writes Dave Renham. In this first half, I will reveal positions 10 down to 6; and next week I'll reveal my top five. Of course, I appreciate that there will be people who disagree with my hierarchy but, ultimately, all ten biases have shown themselves to be profitable to deploy alongside more traditional form reading. As a bonus, today I will also share three near misses that narrowly failed to make the top ten.
Introduction
To compile my top picks, I have used data for handicap chases only as they are not so prone to distortion by the ability range of the horses competing. Data are from 2018 to 2024 with no minimum runner consideration.
I mentioned in a recent offering that Gold members of Geegeez have so many benefits and one of these is access to the Pace Analyser. This allows users to dive into run style / pace biases at any racecourse in the UK and Ireland. The data can be filtered based on going, field size, distance and race type. There is also the option to separate hurdles and chase (and NH Flat) data at jumps courses; and across all courses the data can further be filtered by year to allow for possible changes in any bias. The Pace Analyser is ideal for research such as this, and it was the main source that I used to produce what follows.
The run style data on Geegeez is split into four groups - Led, Prominent, Mid Division and Held Up. A quick refresher of which type of horse fits each profile:
Led – horses that lead early, usually within the first furlong or so; or horses that dispute or fight for the early lead.
Prominent – horses that lay up close to the pace just behind the leader(s).
Mid Division – horses that race mid pack.
Held Up – horses that are held up at, or near the back of the field.
Near Misses
In general, the ‘led’ group has an edge in most handicap chases. Some courses offer a stronger edge than others and hence let me start by looking at the C&Ds that were near misses:
Exeter 2m3f
To get this distance on Geegeez we need to use the 2m4f distance figure on the Query Tool / Pace Analyser as distances are grouped every two furlongs. It should be noted, too, that some race distances at a track change slightly sometimes due to rail adjustments. This happens more and more these days, or at least it is more accurately reported these days!
Let me share the Exeter figures taken from the Pace Analyser:
This is a good time to note that not all run style groups have the same number of runners; there are always going to be far more hold up horses than front runners / early leaders. However, despite the ‘led’ group having just 82 qualifiers compared with the held-up group of 161, they have still won 20 races compared with 15. The Win%s in the table show the strike rate within each run style group, and for this article that is how I will quantify ‘win strike rate’.
The ‘led’ group produced by far the highest percentage at 24%. That is, 24.39% of the horses that led early went on to win their races. (They actually won 31.25% (20/64) of all races in the sample).
Leaders' place percentage was comfortably the best too, with 47.6% of early leaders still in the frame at the finish line; while their A/E index of 1.39 indicates that front runners were very good value.
If we considered favourites only in these races and their performance by run style, we have seen the following win strike rates splits (I have combined favourites whose run style was either Mid Div or Held Up):
Front runners / horses that contested the early lead had an outstanding record when favoured by the market. However, it's a different story for those favourites that raced mid pack or at the back early. As can be seen, the bias over this course and distance has been very strong indeed, but still it wasn't quite enough to make my top ten. Exciting times ahead, then!
Before moving on, in terms of what has happened in 2025, of the eight races to date, five have been won by front runners.
Sedgefield 2m5f to 2m5½f
Using the Geegeez tools we use the 2m6f distance.
Front runners have hit a win rate in excess of 30% and the only reason this track/trip did not make the list is due to the relatively strong stats for horses that raced in midfield early. Also, the 2025 stats to date have seen horses racing mid-pack early doing well and winning three of the six races to date.
Lingfield 2m
The stats were as follows:
Strong figures again for front runners, although this is another course and distance (C&D) where qualifying races were relatively infrequent (only four races per year on average). Indeed, at the time of writing there has been just one qualifying handicap chase in 2025, but it was won by the early leader as we can see:
It is also worth noting that he was projected as the 'probable lone speed' in the race:
OK, near misses shared; onto position ten in my list.
Top 10, 10 to 6
#10 Chepstow 3m
Some readers may expect front runners to be at a disadvantage over longer distances in handicap chases: surely for a horse to lead from start to finish in a 3-mile race would not be any easy assignment, right? However, looking at the Chepstow breakdown I suspect might change a few minds!
Front runners have bossed these races over the past few seasons, while prominent racers have been clearly second best with much better stats than horses which raced off the pace. 68 of the 96 winners raced close to the pace or at the front - that's 71% of the winners from 47% of the runners. And a front runner has been over four times more likely to win than a hold up horse when analysing the win percentage within their respective groups (25% versus 5.7%).
Now, as stated earlier, we get more hold up horses than front runners in most races and there were just over twice as many hold up horses compared to front runners between 2018 and 2024. That means therefore that when talking purely about race wins, front runners have won just over twice the number of races than hold ups.
There have been seven races this year so far with two being won from the front.
#9 Sandown 2m4f
It is time to head to Surrey now, and specifically Esher, to look at the 2m4f stats from Sandown. The run style splits for this time frame were as follows:
It's a similar story to Chepstow’s 3-mile trip but front runners have had a better place record here, hitting over 53%. There have not been that many qualifying races per year (roughly five to six) but keep an eye out for confirmed front runners when they race over this C&D. Those on the early lead have had an even stronger edge on soft/heavy ground as can be seen below:
From Sandown we head up country to Haydock.
#8 Haydock 2m3f-2m5f
Haydock seemed to have 'played around' a little with the usual 2m4f trip occasionally adding or dropping a furlong. Hence, I have combined results together a furlong either side of two and a half miles. Let me share the run style stats:
There has again not been a huge number of races each year, but the front running numbers were extremely strong over the period of study. 11 of the 29 races were won from the front and that cohort also had an outstanding place record. Hold up horses really struggled in terms of winning, though they fared better from a placed perspective.
Haydock, like Sandown, has seen the front running bias strengthen on softer ground. On soft or heavy the run style win strike rates were as follows:
It should be noted the sample size stands at only 17 races. The A/E indices correlate strongly as the graph below shows:
All in all, Haydock over 2m4f has strongly favoured horses racing at the front end.
#7 Carlisle 2m4f
Staying north for number seven, as we head to Carlisle next. The run style splits were:
It could be argued that both Haydock and Sandown should be positioned higher than Carlisle in the list; but Carlisle’s overall sample size was bigger and that swung it for me, along with an outstanding A/E index of 1.57 and excellent IV of 2.4. The figures for both of these metrics were the highest of the four C&Ds shared to date, and comfortably so.
In terms of underfoot, once again we have seen a strengthening of the bias on softer ground. I will share the win strike rate percentages and the A/E indices once more. Firstly, the win stats:
Clearly, as with the 2m4f trips at Sandown and Haydock, on soft or heavy it has been hard to make up ground from further back. 21 of the 27 races were won by front runners (12 wins) or prominent racers (9). Hold up horses had a win rate of under 3% within their run style group which is the lowest figure seen to date.
The A/E indices positively correlate with the win SR%s as we would have expected:
A ‘led’ figure of 1.79 suggests huge value; not so for the 0.26 hold up A/E index.
One final front running stat to share for this track and trip combination is connected with those early leaders that were in the top three of the betting market. This collective won 16 races from 36 qualifiers which equates to a win rate of over 44%.
This year, at the time of writing, there have only been four qualifying races over this C&D (all going conditions), and three of the four have been won from the front.
#6 Doncaster 2m3f to 2m4½f
Onto Donny now to close out the first half of my top ten. They have races over similar distances from 2m3f to 2m4½f so all races within that distance band are included (2m4f for all on Geegeez Pace Analyser):
Front runners have won 20 of the 51 races and have an excellent placed record to boot. The ground is rarely testing at Doncaster, but on good to soft or softer the bias does seem to get even stronger:
11 of the 25 races, which equates to 44% of all races, were won from the front under these conditions.
If we considered favourites only at Doncaster and their performance by run style, we have seen the following win strike rates splits (I have once again combined favourites whose run style was either Mid Div or Held Up):
Favourites that led early have been far more successful than other run style groups.
And that rounds out the lower half of my top ten. Next time it will be the top five, some even stronger biases than these! Until then...
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Waiting-Patiently.jpg320689Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2025-11-12 09:24:292025-11-12 09:24:29Top 10 Front Running Biases in Handicap Chases, Part 1: 10 to 6
The jump campaign 2025/26 began half a year and a few days ago but traditionalists, among the trainers especially, still regard the season proper as having begun authentically only at the Chepstow two-day fixture last month, writes Tony Stafford.
The season’s climax (or anti-climax if your name is Skelton) at Sandown late in April merely confirmed what we knew already. If Willie Mullins targets a potential achievement, he has the resources to bring it home. On that last day he sidestepped the first two races on the Sandown card but won three of the other five and broke doughty Dan’s heart once more.
As Gordon Elliott found several times in their domestic battles in Ireland, it didn’t matter how much of a prizemoney advantage he held over Mullins coming to the engine-room of the Irish season, Willie had the tools to do the job – and in style.
It’s worth re-living that final day. Having ignored the opening two races, both incidentally won by Gary and Josh Moore, Mullins’ subsequent hat-trick included the top prize, the £99k to the winner Celebration Chase where South African-owned Il Etait Temps overcame a year’s absence to humble erstwhile two-mile champ Jonbon, with Willie’s Energumene in third place for good measure. Back in home action at Clonmel in midweek, Il Etait Temps had a stroll round for €35k to set his season off in style.
Surprisingly perhaps, the Bet 365 (formerly Whitbread Gold Cup) didn’t fall to any of his ten of the 19 runners. It defiantly went to the Olly Murphy/Sean Bowen team with Resplendent Grey, staving off the first four of the Mullins horde, in so doing signalling both of their positions at the very top of the UK jumps hierarchy.
Murphy was one of 14 domestic trainers supplying 30 of the 51 runners in those five races contested by Mullins; and Willie had the other 20! In all he picked up £287k of the £530k available on the day – or 55%. If Dan still leads his 69-year-old rival going into the final day next year, maybe he can employ a bulldozer to dig up the course overnight. Then, no doubt, they will just switch the fixture to Kempton!
It might still only be the end of the “phoney” phase of the campaign, but Dan Skelton has already sent out 154 individual horses. Between them 46 have collected 57 wins and £888k in prizemoney. I said it was “phoney”, as remembering Armistice Sunday yesterday, when in early 1940 the bombs hadn’t yet started falling on London in what was known as the phoney war.
I’ll tell you how phoney the jumps season has been. Mullins has had just two jump runners here in Britain since he mopped up all that money back in April. Winter Fog, eighth in the Cesarewitch last month, went on to Wetherby for the Grade 2 staying hurdle on Charlie Hall Chase Day and was fourth of five, collecting a paltry £3,650 for his exertions. At Cheltenham, in between those two excursions, Chart Topper pulled up in a Pertemps qualifier.
Anyway, enough of that old suff. Not entirely, as the main thesis of my article – took a while coming, Ed! - as it relates to a chance comment on Sky Sports Racing that, “Dan Skelton is the ‘target’ trainer par excellence”. He’s pretty good, of course, habitually winning those Cheltenham Festival handicap hurdles especially from under the noses of the Irish handicap-doctored brigade.
But I would nominate another UK trainer, Jamie Snowden, as having honed the skill of making long-range plans for his horses. Before starting training in Lambourn in season 2008/09 he was a top-class amateur connected to the Nicky Henderson stable and a regular winner of the Sandown Military races following and during an army career.
On Saturday at Aintree his Colonel Harry returned after ten months off the track to win the Grand Sefton Chase with a patient ride from Gavin Sheehan, reminiscent, to me anyway, of Graham Lee’s wonderful victory for Ginger McCain in the 2004 Grand National on Amberleigh House.
He has inevitably the Coral Gold Cup in three weeks at Newbury as his immediate ambition. The way Colonel Harry finished off Saturday’s race suggests he will have a great chance to win another “Hennessy” as the trainer still calls the race following his victory two years ago with Datsalrightgino.
It took a few years for Snowden to get going as a trainer but single figures became 19 at the fourth attempt and the progress has been steady and impressive since then. After a few seasons in the high 40s he made a significant jump to 62 last term.
That was achieved at a healthy 21 per cent, comfortably better than Skelton (19%) and Mullins (18%) and his prizemoney peaked at £807k. Already he has won 38 races this season from only 130 runs, with 23 individual scores from a mere 57 horses to have run before yesterday.
He’s operating at an almost unthinkable 29 per cent so far this campaign with another 66 runners in the places 2nd to 4th – making it 104 of 130 in the first four.
Snowden has an exhaustive programme of sourcing and developing young horses. He is very mindful of pedigrees and, after deciding and securing horses, he often leaves sales purchases to learn their job for a year in Ireland before bringing them across. His is a stable that deservedly has made it onto the top table in the UK. Watch out – he is only getting better which he had already been doing superbly for years.
The 2025 flat race season ended in something of a whimper at Doncaster on Saturday. It’s nobody’s fault, but for a start there were few enough top riders still around, many taking a holiday after their exertions at the Breeders’ Cup – the season for title purposes ending with British Champions Day at Ascot in mid-October – while others are getting ready for lucrative winter work in Dubai and elsewhere.
It can take a while to get going on the demanding Hong Kong circuit – well two tracks anyway. David Probert and Richard Kingscote, who rode a close 2nd at Sha Tin yesterday, are yet to get off the mark after being there for a while. Not so Hollie Doyle who made an instant impact with an all-the-way winner on the first day of her contract there on a 20/1 shot on Wednesday.
Yesterday she had two second places, both outrunning their outsider odds and with rides in almost every race, you can see she will soon be a fan favourite in the former colony.
Back home, the star turn at Doncaster was undoubtedly Billy Loughnane, although he couldn’t add to his tally of 180 wins. But that, and his runner-up spot in the Jockeys’ Championship behind the remarkable Oisin Murphy, tells the now four-times champion that any lapse in his sometimes questionable concentration is sure to be readily punished.
Such is Loughnane’s momentum, in only his third full season, he could well hit the 200-winner mark after an initial six in 2022, 130 in 2023 and 162 last year. He seems unstoppable, getting rides for many top stables, notably Godolphin. His following is such that level-stakes bets on all his mounts in 2025 has shown a loss of 306 points – indicating that despite his above average ability, his mounts are routinely overbet.
Another young rider already making an impact is Toby Moore, 17, on the way with three wins (two for Charlie Appleby) from his first 20 mounts. Ryan Moore’s son must be a big candidate for next year’s apprentices’ title, if any bookmaker is brave enough to offer a price.
An exploration of Irish National Hunt trainers using the Geegeez Query Tool
Gold members of Geegeez have so many benefits and for the first part of this article I am going to discuss how I used one of these, the Query Tool, to obtain a wealth of trainer data, writes Dave Renham. The second part of the piece will crunch some of those numbers.
My focus was Irish racing and hence Irish trainers in National Hunt races. Data has been taken from 1st January 2018 to 30th September 2025 with profits and losses calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) with a 2% commission applied on any winning bets.
Setting Up With Query Tool
So, the starting point for using the Query Tool was straightforward: by inputting the date range, then going to the RACE menu where, on the Country tab, I ticked ‘Ire’ and then, going to the Race Code tab, I ticked all of the NH code boxes. The screenshot below shows the filters used:
So, this gave me all the Irish data I was looking for so – over 11,000 races as can be seen from the 'Wins' column:
Next I went to the RUNNER menu and then clicked on the ‘Trainer’ radio button, which groups the criteria by the selected variable (in this case, trainer), and then I clicked 'Generate Report'. This gave me the records for every single Irish trainer who had had a runner during the period of study. The first few trainers in alphabetical order are shown below:
From here I wanted to focus only on the trainers who sent out the most runners in order to have big enough sample sizes to drill down into other areas. I ordered the trainers by runs in the Query Tool and decided on 800 runs or more as my cut off point. This gave me 29 trainers to review. By ticking the ‘+’ sign to the left of each of these 29 trainers' names (and, when doing this, the plus sign became a minus sign meaning the trainer had been selected), I added them to my shortlist. Once all were ticked, I generated a new report with only these 29 trainers shown:
I then went back to the SUMMARY tab (top of the main part of the page) and used the 'COPY' button to paste all of the trainer data into a Microsoft Excel file I had already opened. With the 29 trainers logged in the Query Tool, I then went about generating numerous reports by changing the Query Tool variables or options. Once generated, new reports were pasted into a worksheet and I added an additional column with the specific variable for that report. I created 30 different reports, all copied across to my Excel worksheet. This took no more than 20 minutes tops, and I now had all the data I needed to analyse and number crunch.
Irish NH Trainers, by Win Strike Rate
The rest of this article will take a more familiar format for regular readers, although I may discuss some Excel methods I used along the way, in case you want to do some digging for yourself!
First things first, let me share the results for each of the 29 trainers over the timeframe (trainers ordered by win strike rate):
One immediate point to share is that Irish racing has had bigger average field sizes when compared to the UK in recent years, and that helps to explain why the trainer strike rates are generally lower than we are be used to seeing when looking at UK trainer data. The maestro that is Willie Mullins was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of win strike rate having hit a touch more than one win in every four. His runners, if backed ‘blind’, made a very small profit to BSP. The second and third listed trainers, Henry de Bromhead and Joseph O’Brien, were also profitable to BSP. A handful of other trainers made a profit to BSP, but all of these had at least one massive BSP priced winner to skew their bottom line somewhat.
Irish NH Trainers, by 'Favourite' performance
One advantage of copying the 30 different reports into Excel meant I could create a Pivot Table to easily compare the data sets and see if there were any significant patterns or angles that were worth sharing. Pivot tables are an extremely useful way to number crunch data in Excel. For those interested in finding out more about them there are plenty of easy to follow YouTube videos around.
I started off by analysing some betting market stats beginning with trainer data for favourites. In order to have a big enough sample, I decided that a trainer must have saddled at least 100 or more favourites during the period of study. I wanted to start by comparing their overall win strike rate for 'All favs' with their strike rates for market leaders specifically in chases or hurdle races. The sample size for NH Flat favourites was too small for most trainers, so I have opted not to show that. The splits were thus:
Don’t be too put off by the huge variance in strike rates between, say, Mullins and Rothwell, because 88% of market leaders for Mullins were in non-handicaps, and 84% of Rothwell’s were in handicaps. Non-handicap favourites start at much shorter prices on average than handicap jollies, so Mullins was always going to have a much higher strike rate when comparing the two of them. Talking of handicaps and non-handicaps it makes sense for me to share and compare their win strike rates to help illustrate my previous point:
Most trainers conformed to the pattern of much better win rates in non-handicaps, although a few did buck this trend. Declan Queally, for example, had virtually the same strike rate in both race types and when we analyse his results in full, we see the following:
Favourites in handicaps produced excellent returns for Queally and anyone following his market leaders in these contests would have been counting their money. Philip Rothwell has fared far better in handicaps than non-handicaps with favourites, but the vast majority of his market leaders were in handicaps (only 18 in non-handicaps).
It's time to narrow down the research a little by looking at a handful of the most successful trainers.
Irish NH Trainers: Specific Handlers
Willie Mullins
I called him the ‘maestro’ earlier and he has been in a different league to his peer group in recent years. Clearly, he has the backing of some huge owners and gets many of the best horses, but one still needs to deliver. I have shared some of his market leader stats already, and below is a graph sharing his ROI percentages (BSP) in more specific race types – handicap chases, handicap hurdles, non-handicap chases, non-handicap hurdles and NH Flat races.
As can be seen, Mullins produced excellent returns when saddling the favourite in non-handicap chases. The full stats read 316 wins from 536 (SR 59%) for a profit of £116.47 (ROI +21.7%). He also showed a blind profit with market leaders in non-handicap hurdle races thanks to 540 wins from 1028 runners (SR 52.5%) for a profit of £75.68 (ROI +7.5%). He was less successful in handicaps, making a loss in both chase and hurdle race types. His worst record with favourites was in NH Flat races where losses were close to 9 pence in the £.
Switching to all runners rather than just favourites, Mullins had some powerful stats during the period of study when we analyse the run style of his runners in chase contests. Regular readers of my articles will know that chases tend to offer front runners a solid edge over all other run styles. Mullins conformed to this pattern in such races going back to the start of 2018 as the graph below, which shows his win strike rate across the different run styles, highlights:
Mullins’ horses that have taken the lead at the start of their chase races went onto win nearly 45% of their races. If we had known pre-race which of his horses would front run and backed them accordingly, we would have been in profit to the tune of £185.78 (ROI +36.1%). Compare this to the potential returns of midfield and held up runners, which would have lost 18p and 30p in the £ respectively.
Moving on to the very best contests, Class 1 events. Here, Mullins produced a blind profit and, considering he had 2536 runners in them, this was an impressive performance, even more so considering every Irish (and British) punter knows what this trainer has achieved. His record in Grade 3 races produced the best results: 117 wins from 457 (SR 25.6%) for a profit of £74.58 (ROI +16.3%).
Henry de Bromhead
Henry de Bromhead had some amazing wins in the UK during this timeframe, especially at the Cheltenham Festival, but here I will drill into his Irish record in more detail. His overall record showed a blind profit equating to over 6p in the £ and his yearly splits are shown in the graph below:
2021 was a poor year from a returns’ perspective, and 2020 showed a small loss, but the other six years all returned a profit. Hence, de Bromhead has been extremely consistent over this timeframe.
Like Mullins, de Bromhead has some interesting stats connected with run style but his most interesting numbers have been in hurdle races. His win strike rate splits have been as follows:
Horses that have led early have been the most successful by far and, if our crystal ball had been in tip top working order, backing these runners pre-race would have yielded a very healthy return of nearly 70p in the £.
From a personal perspective it will be sad that we will not see the iconic Rachael Blackmore riding for him in the future. They have been one of the best trainer/jockey combos of recent years and gave racing fans some great memories.
Gordon Elliott
For Gordon Elliott I would like to share his record with favourites in NH Flat races. Each year Elliott has had numerous runners in NH Flat races of which roughly 28% of them have started favourite. His record with these market leaders was as follows:
For favourites to return over 30p in the £ across a good number of bets is rare, so Elliott has performed well above the norm with this cohort of runners.
Elliott is another trainer who produced some very interesting run style stats during this time period. The stats for hurdle races were as follows:
As we know, the run style each Elliott horse employed was only known after the start of its race. Hence, the profit figures for leaders and prominent runners were not something we could have achieved in reality. However, what it does show once again is that for the majority of races the importance of being up with the pace rather than off the pace.
Geegeez Gold members interested in run style research can investigate further by using the Pace Analyser if wishing to dig into specific courses and/or distances. The example screenshot below shows some Carlisle data:
Parameters of race code, course, distance, going, number of runners, handicap/non-handicap and time frame can all be tweaked. Also we can check out both Irish and UK courses.
Members can also use the Query Tool for run style research like I have done for this article exploring other areas such as trainers, jockeys, etc.
Joseph O’Brien
Jospeh O’Brien, like Gordon Elliott, has produced positive stats when it comes to NH Flat races. The table below shows his overall record in these races, his record with favourites, and his record with horses that were in the top three of the betting:
O’Brien has clearly excelled in these races, and it will be interesting to see what happens over the coming season.
Like the other trainers discussed, O’Brien has worthwhile run style stats to share. Below is a graph showing the win percentages for each run style group in both chases and hurdle races:
Once again, we see front runners from his stable had a huge edge over prominent racers who in turn had a significant edge over horses that were held up or raced in midfield.
**
I hope this article has served two purposes. Firstly, I wanted to show that research can be undertaken very quickly to generate useful stats and across a variety of areas; and secondly, I have shared some data relating to the highest volume Irish trainers which we should be able to use to our advantage this coming winter and beyond.
Finally, I hope some members will be tempted to use the content here to inspire your own research using Query Tool, Pace Analyser and the other tools in the Geegeez Swiss Army Knife.
Until next time...
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/mullins_elliott_fists-1.jpg319830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2025-11-05 09:53:332025-11-05 09:53:48An Irish National Hunt Trainers Analysis
Breeders' Cup 2025 in beautiful Del Mar, sunny California (obligatory adjectives) whizzed by over the weekend, a back-loaded two-day event featuring 14 Championship races, nine of them on the Saturday, and loads of international interest.
What follows is a combination of my race thoughts, betting outcomes and lessons learned from one of the toughest wagering puzzle books in the calendar.
We kicked off Friday, a day comprising the five two-year-old races, with the Juvenile Turf Sprint. This was a full field of 12, though Charlie Appleby's Military Code missed the event and one of the 'also eligibles' (reserves) got a run. In my preview, I'd noted how hard it was to win from a wide draw and had sided against those runners, a group that included a lot of the speed in the race. As it happened, the horse drawn 9 tracked the wide speed and won well; Aidan's second string, Brussels, finished best for the runner up slot from stall 1.
This was to set the tone regarding wide drawn horses winning on the turf track - and my pre-race opposition to them - and is one of the lessons learned as I'll come on to. As we'll also see, it was a result that favoured me: I'd backed Cy Fair ante post before the draw, and at 20/1 compared with his US tote price of 5/1 (presumably bigger with the UK bookmakers). I would not have backed him on the day at his 'day of race' price or from his draw; so I was kind of lucky here. That luck wouldn't hold.
I nominated Military Code in the Compendium - he was a non-runner. The trends picks were True Love and Havana Anna, a pair of fillies which never got involved - getting in each other's way a bit before finishing 8th and last of 12.
Juvenile Fillies
The first dirt race, and one in which I'd made four ante-post bets, three of which failed to enter the race! This is another lesson to learn. The other one, and the view I'd taken in the Breeders' Cup Compendium (BCC hereafter), was Iron Orchard, winner of key prep the Frizette. It turns out that race was no good this year, which was what the market felt; I had suggested the form might be under-rated. I was wrong on that. The unexposed filly Super Corredora made all on an annoyingly speed-favouring track, another feature of the weekend.
I'd noted that "she showed much her best form when stretched out to a mile, blitzing her field by more than eight lengths. She seemed much more at home with the steadier tempo of that mile race, travelling kindly throughout" but the class gulf meant I overlooked her save for suggesting "Super Corredora and La Wally have small bits of a chance in what might not be a vintage renewal".
It wasn't a vintage renewal and Iron Orchard finished last, La Wally second last, with Super C returning around 9/1 having been 20/1 a day before the race.
Juvenile Fillies Turf
This is a race I've been trying to beat ante post for a while, my angle being that the Euros had a shocking record in it and the US team was vastly under-rated by the British books. However, Aidan had won two of the last three - and with classy fillies Meditate and Lake Victoria - so maybe the tide was turning. Certainly he had another top notcher in Precise entered this time, though she had the worst draw in 13 of 13. She got withdrawn on the morning of the race.
My plays were scattergun: five bets, two ante post non-runners and three guesses against the (withdrawn) favourite. The best I could manage was fifth as Balantina, an unconsidered Donnacha horse, beat Pacific Mission, an unconsidered Balding horse. They were drawn 10 and 12 respectively, and the third exited post 11. I could not have got this more wrong if I'd tried.
The key to the wide horses dominating the finish was a mental early pace set by Switch In Love, a Japanese runner who should have been in the sprint; she went 22.33 for the first quarter mile, which is ridiculous. That was material because it stretched the field out into almost single file, meaning those wide horses did not have to travel four and five horses away from the rail around the turns which they would have had to do off a more sensible tempo. I was unable to locate any run style information on the tearaway leader and that blind spot - not the last of the weekend - was expensive in this case.
Ultimate Love and Ground Support were the BCC trends picks in the race, the latter running third - under Adam Beschizza, remember him? - at close to 25/1. My own picks, as discussed, are still running.
Juvenile
The Juvenile featured one of the shortest priced horses of the weekend, Ted Noffey, in the shortest field of the weekend. Just six went to post after Civil Liberty and, more painfully for my ante post bets, Blackout Time were scratched. Ted got it done while Intrepido, flagged along with Blackout Time in the BCC, ran down the field: his waited with run style was extremely unfavoured on this track over the two days. I'm sure it's difficult but this was such a biased track for such a big day; surely they can do better. Ted was trends pick.
Juvenile Turf
Again, my angle was that wide would be compromised and again they went a million miles an hour. This time, Outfielder - who was also entered in the Juvenile Turf Sprint and surely should have run there - went berzerk, blitzing the opening two furlongs in 22.2 seconds! (They have a thing called 'run up' in US races, which is a bit of ground not measured by the clock meaning he achieved that time from a running start; I'd say it would be impossible to do it from a standing start!)
So, once more, the hellish early gallop stretched them out, Gstaad - the best horse in the race, no question - getting a great trip under Soumi. He was the BCC trends pick but was definitely not my form preview pick on account of... well you know by now. Joseph's North Coast was third and a 58/1 bomb ran second; if he'd beaten Gstaad, I'd have had a trifecta that paid for the weekend. 'If' is a very cheap word on Breeders' Cup weekend...
I flagged three e/w against the fav, the best of them, Street Beast, finishing fourth at 16/1 for place money with most books.
Friday Bets
A difficult punting day but not a massive disaster, mainly on account of there only being five of the 14 races staged that day! Here was my tale of the punting tape. The odds differential column on the right hand side compares the price taken with the US return. A number bigger than 1 means the price taken beat the returned price. This is for guidance only because there are lots of white spaces where the non-runners appear. Waaaay too many non-runners on Juvenile Friday.
Saturday
Bloodied but unbowed, Saturday arrived. I've long held the view that a 6-8 split of races would work better than the 5-9 - it's just a bit of a slog by the end on Saturday; but there's no real way to add a non-juvenile race to the Friday card without arguably undermining it a little. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to have either the Turf Sprint or the Filly & Mare Sprint start the Friday card. That would undoubtedly give more balance to the BC race distribution but I can see why it would be unpalatable to connections. As with so many things, it is what it is.
Filly & Mare Sprint
Speaking of the FM Sprint, it is a low key starter to Saturday's proceedings and, this year, was even more muted than normal thanks to the double scratch - veterinary advice, it's a big deal in California where the anti-racing brigade are visual and vocal and well represented in politics - of Sweet Azteca and Tamara, the first two in the betting.
They were also some of the speed, meaning it would be even harder for Zeitlos - my deep closer pick - to run them down from out back. As it happened, she made a really nice move on the turn before flattening out into fourth; which was no good from a betting return perspective. I didn't have a view in the BCC, flagging winner Splendora as a possible (along with others). The trends pick Hope Road ran third.
Turf Sprint
The first grass race Saturday and another Euro hopeful after notching two of the three turf contests on Friday. The race was again denuded of some of its lustre as Adrian Murray's well-fancied Arizona Blaze failed the vet. My pick, Motorious, always needs the splits to appear with his late running style; and they didn't here. He stayed on for a never nearer fifth. Arizona had been the trends pick. Shisospicy very impressively led all the way, while Khaadem, a horse that needs another furlong, produced a mighty effort in third for Charlie Hills and Frankie Dettori.
This was a race marred by the desperate loss of She's Quality, a massive flag bearer for the Jack Davison team. She pulled up soon after the start and was found to have an irreparable pelvic fracture. So sad.
Sprint
The six furlong dirt sprint was a race in which Bentornato was a strong favourite. I'd backed him after his prep run win - lucky me, right? - but couldn't put him up at shorter than 2/1 in a full field given the chance he might 'bounce' after that huge return effort. He didn't bounce and he again ran huge, scoring by better than two lengths for the same trainer, Jose d'Angelo, who had won the preceding Turf Sprint.
Bentornato was a trends contender in the BCC, and my trio of e/w bombs for the race included the Japanese horse American Stage, which ran 4th at 33/1 in UK. That was a paying place position.
Distaff
The nine furlong Distaff was all about Seismic Beauty for a lot of people but, as she "picked up a quarter" - a lovely euphemism for taking a bobble/pitching forward - a couple of strides out of the gate, her race was over; she was eventually eased off.
Her failure to contest the pace, which she habitually does, made life a lot easier for Scylla on that speed-favouring strip. She made pretty much all to score by a five length margin from Canadian hope Nitrogen, with my deep closer play Regaled (33/1) picking up third, and e/w pick Clicquot getting fourth - a paying place with many books.
Seismic was the trends pick, along with a non-runner, and BCC form picks Clicquot and Regaled both made the place payouts at solid prices.
Turf
Next up was the Turf, and it was a typical 'right thinking, wrong play' renewal of a race I just always get wrong. The 'wrong Euro' angle is so strong in the Turf. This time, Minnie Hauk was the strong betting favourite but she'd had a long enough season and a hard enough race in the Arc. Ethical Diamond, for Willie, had shown blistering closing speed in a Royal Ascot handicap and then the Ebor - and he did the same again here. In my write up, I'd noted, "He’s not a million miles from the required level, probably needing to find seven pounds or so; and he showed a dazzling turn of foot at Ascot, closing out the last quarter mile up the hill in 23.24 off an even tempo. And again, off a slowish early pace, he ran the last two furlongs at York in 23.89 seconds. I’m almost talking myself into this..!"
Almost. But I didn't talk myself into it.
The trends highlighted four horses which included Rebel's Romance in second and El Cordobes - 33/1 back home - in third. My BCC form suggestions were Goliath (very disappointing) and Amiloc (nice effort in 4th, a paying place).
Classic
A fascinating contest even without its star attraction, Sovereignty having spiked a temperature a couple of days before the race. I'd mused about the lack of form lines between generations and it indeed transpired that the older horses were clear of the classic cohort, filling the podium with the same trio that did likewise a year ago. The pack was shuffled this time, however, and it was the Japanese superstar Forever Young - on the same day that human compatriot Yoshinobu Yamamoto headlined in the LA Dodgers' unlikely World Series comeback win - that emerged on top for one of the world's best trainers, Yoshito Yahagi. It was a big night for Californian Japanese residents!
Forever Young, racing handily throughout, held the (frequently) unlucky Sierra Leone by an evaporating half length at the line. That one always comes hard and late in his races; you know by now the piste was against him. Fierceness rounded out a chalky trifecta as the remaining trends pick (Sovereignty, a lovely ante post ticket for me, was sunk on Thursday. Sigh)
I felt the market had the race by the short and curlies and so it proved. Trying to be cute, I sided with a pair of longshots who ran accordingly in 7th and 8th of nine, beating only the no hoper pacemaker. My other star ante post bet, Baeza, took a lot of support... and also ran clunk, with five horses in front of home past the wire 🙁
Mile
It was looking for all the world like a washout for yours true before the Mile. I'd invested in Notable Speech ante post at 6/1 and 13/2, another value bet before the gates opened, his SP around 5/2. Of course, I'd watched that show a number of times already over the weekend only to grimace at the twist in the tale. This time, no such worries as a confident William Buick steered Notable Speech to an easy length and a half verdict over Formidable Man, now six wins and a second on the Del Mar turf - and the best Californian grass horse for a few years.
The Lion In Winter ran a belter in third, with Sahlan for Francis-Henri Graffard closing too late into fifth. He was beaten a nose for fourth, sinking a decent ante post each way ticket. I'm running out of sighs.
Sahlan and Rhetorical, the horse that clung to fourth, were the Trends picks while BCC flagged Sahlan and Jonquil, the latter very disappointing (to me) in ninth.
Dirt Mile
This was one favourite I wanted to be with. Nysos had looked a proper horse this season and, though he'd had a minor injury scare since his last win, he towered over his field on form and numbers. As it turned out, he was all but undone by the track bias, eventually prevailing in a desperate head bob photo with the almost-all-the-way Citizen Bull, last year's Juvenile champion.
He was the trends pick and the form pick in BCC, and he was the second leg of a 'Ted Nysos' double for me which clawed back a few of the many prior wrong turns I'd made.
Filly & Mare Turf
We closed out with the FM Turf and, as it was last year, my biggest bet of the weekend. As it was last year, that was on Cinderella's Dream; and, as it was last year, I left the money in the satchel. A year ago she'd be terribly unlucky in defeat, a fast closing second having failed to secure the gaps. This time, she was flat as a dab and finished midfield. So much for cutely grabbing four places each way - she finished eighth!
More happily, I had also backed Gezora earlier in the week at 9/2. Gezora won in a photo with another wire-to-wire attempter, the excellent US mare She Feels Pretty. But wait, what's this? Gezora returned 9.1/1 on the US 'nanny' and 14.5 on Betfair! Jaysus holy cripes. Way to turn a winner into a loser!
Trying to catch the superfecta (first four correct order) which paid a tidy $781.15 for a $0.10 stake, I had omitted She Feels Pretty, the clear second choice and a mare I greatly respected, in the second spot despite taking five horses in that berth. It wasn't a good weekend for my on track tote plays.
Nothing here for the trends picks, Cinders and See The Fire (the only wide drawn horse all weekend that got beaten - this was a slow pace and she could never get a position). But the BCC form suggestion included Gezora along with Cinders. I very much hope some of you managed to get either US tote, bookie odds or Betfair SP, all of which were at least double the price I took. Siiiiiigh.
Saturday Bets
In the end, thanks to a short-priced double and the ante post bet in the Mile - as well as that losing winner on Gezora - I managed to scrape a profit from my bookie bets. But, by the time I'd accounted for $500 of losing tote tickets - I bought a voucher for that much and steadily burned through it over the two days, so it was at least easy to track the size of the hole - it was a losing weekend. Candidly, it looked like being a lot worse than it turned out.
The nature of festival betting, whether it's Royal Ascot, Cheltenham or the Breeders' Cup, is that it's a very small sample size which can make one appear disproportionately good or bad. This year I looked pretty bad based on the results, but I hope Compendium readers appreciate the amount of legwork that went into those losers! I'll be doing little different next year... but I won't be doing nothing different next year. See 'lessons learned' below.
These were my Saturday bets.
And this is a little summary info on my weekend, for whatever it's worth.
Lessons Learned
Every day is a school day, especially when punting big events. Below are my lessons learned from BC2025, the 42nd edition of what is a strong contender for my favourite event of the racing year. (Apologies to just about everyone reading!!!)
1 A fast pace brings wide-drawn runners into consideration on the turf course
Those sprinter fractions on the front end in the mile two-year-old races completely unstitched the inside draw bias. As long as the horse was good enough, shunning the early speed from anywhere was the way to get it done. We knew Gstaad was good enough, and respect to Balantina also.
2 Do not bet juvenile races ante post
This one is a bit more nuanced. I've had good results doing this in the past, and indeed Cy Fair was a solid start to the meeting this time on a horse I would not have played on the day. But there's no doubt that it's attritional in terms of horses either failing to enter at the pre-entry stage or getting scratched by the CHRB (California Horse Racing Board) vets. They may be slightly stricter than their Keeneland counterparts who will oversee next year's Cup, but it's a big risk annually that horses bet early may not get a run; seemingly even more so in the juvenile races.
3 Look for electric acceleration in the turf races
I think the lesson here is that, to win on the grass, you need very fast closing speed; and, obviously, that needs to be in the context of the projected race pace. Gstaad, Ethical Diamond, Notable Speech, Gezora and co were all super-rapid at the end of their races and had demonstrated that earlier in the season. This does seem the key to unlocking the mile-plus turf races.
4 Consider the impact of field size on likely winner odds
This year I backed a LOT of outsiders; many more than I usually do. It did not pay off. Looking at the field sizes, which were generally smaller on the main (dirt) track, that was a mistake. It can be a crushing meeting to be backing favourites, which often have a torrid time of it; but as field sizes diminish there is less scope for a randomizer pace burn up and shock results. I definitely need to keep that in mind in dirt race considerations going forward.
5 Don't bet so many closers
Related, smaller fields tend to mean less early pace, which in turn means less opportunity for late runners to get involved. The imponderable when putting a guide together before the meeting starts is always how the dirt track will play. Usually, it's pretty fair, but sometimes it just hugely favours early speed. This year was one of those years.
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Breeders' Cup XLII (42 for cash) was a typically brilliant international showcase, with winners trained in UK, Ireland, France and Japan - as well as in the United States, of course. While it was shorn of its main star with the late defection of Sovereignty (who I personally feel would probably have been beaten given the primacy of the older horses), it still delivered quality and drama in supersize measure.
A quiet one for Aidan and Charlie - a single win apiece - meant space on the turf roll of honour for Donnacha, Willie and Francis-Henri. The meeting was all the better for that: expect at least the last two to be trying again twelve months hence, along with their more established colleagues.
It'll be Kentucky and autumnal weather for the BC43. God willing, I'll be there; and here's hoping for more of the same from a sporting perspective and, well, just more from a punting one.
- Matt
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Gezora_FMTurf_DelMar_2025.png318830Matt Bisognohttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngMatt Bisogno2025-11-04 10:43:592025-11-04 10:43:59Breeders’ Cup 2025: The Review
There are different opinions as to whether it was Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw who suggested England and America were two nations divided by a common language, writes Tony Stafford. Once again over 14 races at the Breeders’ Cup in Del Mar, California, horse racing was the common theme, but American dirt is as foreign to European trainers as their own turf seems to be to the Americans.
All weekend, European horses mopped up where they ought to have done but among the stream of fantastic performances in either discipline, I have to nominate Willie Mullins and his extraordinary achievement in winning the Breeders’ Cup Turf with Ethical Diamond.
I never stop hearing from my friend Maurice Manasseh that his son David, who owns half of the top hurdler Ballyburn, swears by anything Willie Mullins tells him. Indeed, if he’d phoned that morning to say he’d walked across the Irish Sea rather than catch a plane to come to Cheltenham, he probably would have believed that too.
I’m sure that the Heffernan family, two of whose members that own Ethical Diamond would also believe that and anything else you told them about Ireland’s greatest jump trainer. His achievements even outdo those of Vincent O’Brien for the few years the great man and former incumbent at Ballydoyle bothered with the winter game.
In May 2022 at Arqana sales, Mullins and his talent spotter Harold Kirk paid €260k for the 11-times-raced Absurde from the stable of Carlos Laffon-Parias on behalf of the same Heffernan-based syndicate that was to own Ethical Diamond.
Within three months the then five-year-old had easily won a novice hurdle then was second to his star stable-companion Vauban in the Copper Horse Handicap at Royal Ascot. Unplaced then at the Galway Festival in a novice hurdle, he beat the high-class stayer Sweet William for the Ebor Handicap and its £300k prize at York.
The following year, 14 months after the other inspired purchase, the magical duo shelled out 320,000gns at Tattersalls July sale for the three-year-old Ethical Diamond a couple of weeks after he had broken his maiden at the third attempt for trainer Michael Wiliam O’Meara.
It took a little longer for him to match the achievement of Absurde, indeed he finished 51 lengths adrift of stable companion Majborough in the 2024 Triumph Hurdle on his third attempt in juvenile hurdles for Mullins. Yet after one run back on the flat, he was backed down to 7/4 for a handicap at Royal Ascot.
He didn’t win that day under Ryan Moore, but he put that to rights again under Ryan at 3/1 this June, and I remember David (and Maurice) telling anyone who would listen that “he’s a certainty”. Ryan was committed to riding a Coolmore horse in the Ebor, so William Buick stepped in and Ethical Diamond gave him an armchair ride in achieving that eye-watering double within two years for trainer and owners.
Moore, no doubt still bemoaning his luck at missing all the rides for Coolmore at the meeting – one winner from the top-class juvenile Gstaad was their return – will probably have been amazed by the performance of his former partner. The same will have gone for William Buick, especially as when he and Rebel’s Romance shot clear in the straight in the attempt to win the Turf race for the third time, it was the horse he’d ridden in the Ebor only a couple of months earlier that denied him.
I mentioned earlier the two nations that are divided by a common language. The otherwise well clued-up main US television experts dismissed the Ebor as “not even a Stakes race”. No boys, it’s just the most valuable handicap in Europe. Also, Jessica Harrington, one of whose former inmates is now being trained in the US, might not have been delighted to learn it “had been trained in England”.
While he has made a habit of winning flat-race races like the Cesarewitch and Ascot Stakes along with the Queen Alexandra Stakes, also at Ascot, Willie is still regarded as a jumps trainer per se. Not now though and I’m sure that while many UK trainers admired his achievement on Saturday, with his first runner at a Breeders’ Cup at the age of 69, they will be dreading his name appearing in many more of our valuable handicaps from now on.
The 28/1 winner was ridden with great confidence, coming from the widest draw of all by Dylan Browne McMonagle, the newly crowned, youthful and very articulate Irish champion jockey, who has been a mainstay of Joseph O’Brien’s team for a few years now.
Meanwhile Mullins and the two Heffernan boys were quickly out to San Diego airport to fly to Australia where Absurde runs in the Melbourne Cup on Tuesday. There’s no reason why the £2.2million prize there should be beyond this versatile performer who has a County Hurdle win at Cheltenham on his dance card.
Kerrin McEvoy, who spent time with Godolphin in the UK, comfortably manages his 8st6lb weight. Vauban, now with Gai Waterhouse and her training partner Adrian Bott, is also in the 24-runner field in the race that stops the nation.
I thought the win of Forever Young for his Japanese connections in the $7 million Classic was tremendous, not just for the result but the fact that the same three horses filled the first three places as they did a year ago.
Then, Forever Young had finished third behind fellow three-year-olds Sierra Leone and Fierceness. Here he overtook Fierceness coming to the last furlong and held off the strong and expected late finish from Sierra Leone. As he had also been only narrowly denied by Mystik Dan and Sierra Leone (nose and the same) in the Kentucky Derby on his earlier US sortie, this was due reward for trainer Yoshito Yahagi, who in 2021 had given Japan two other Breeders’ Cup wins on the same Del Mar track.
The alteration to the programme which has brought the Classic from its place as the climax of the card to having three more races to follow isn’t to everyone’s taste. The last of them, the Filly and Mare Turf, went to the pin up boys of French racing, Francis-Henri Graffard and Mickael Barzalona.
They had teamed up to win the Arc last month with Daryz and the Champion Stakes at Ascot two weekends ago with Calandagan. Now they struck again here with the filly Gezora, winner of the French Oaks in the summer but unplaced in unfavourably soft ground and from a very difficult draw when partnered by Tom Marquand in the Arc. She had been the morning line favourite on Saturday but drifted alarmingly in the market on the race, starting at a rewarding 9/1 as she ran down She Feels Pretty in the last half-furlong, winning by half a length.
She Feels Pretty will travel straight across to Kentucky where she will be offered for sale. Having already collected more than £2 million from eight wins and three second places in only 13 runs, She Feels Pretty will be on most of the big players’ sights.
It was good to see a smart ride by William Buick and a brilliant tactical plan by Charlie Appleby pay off with an easy, drawing-away win for 2024 2,000 Guineas victor Notable Speech in the Mile turf race. He was unluckily beaten a neck behind Diego Velazquez in the Prix Jacques Le Marois at Deauville in the summer.
Sam Sangster and the National Stud where Sangster’s shrewd acquisition will stand as a stallion next year will be delighted to advertise him as having beaten Classic winner Notable Speech in a Group 1 race. Sam won’t be bothered at all that had William Buick got him out of a tangle a couple of strides earlier, that crucial Group 1 win probably would not have happened.
This the fifth and final article in a series which has been looking forward to the National Hunt season, writes Dave Renham. In the previous piece I discussed handicap hurdles, while for this one, National Hunt Flat races, often called Bumpers, take centre stage.
As throughout the series, data have been taken from 1st January 2018 to 31st August 2025 with profit and loss calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) with a 2% commission applied on any winning bets. Only UK NH races have been researched, so this does not include Irish racing. Most NH bumpers are run on turf, but there have been a few races contested on the all-weather (roughly 20 every year). I will include both in the breakdowns.
Bumpers are not the type of races I bet in regularly, although I have had some bets in the past in the biggest races held at the Cheltenham and Aintree festivals. Hence, this was a piece of research I was looking forward to because of my limited past knowledge of such contests.
We have had a reasonable number of qualifying races per year, the average being around 270 over the past few years. So, over the time frame this equated to just over 2000 races. I will start as I have done for the previous four articles by examining the betting market.
Market factors
I used Betfair in terms of market rank and this was what I found:
Favourites performed solidly, losing only a small amount (1.5 pence in the £). The value has seemingly been with horses that started third in the betting. However, before we get too carried away, 2024 and 2025 combined proved a poor period for third favs as they lost £69.52 to £1 level stakes incurring losses of 18 pence in the £. As with some data I have shared in the past, I believe the overall profit for third favs was down to variance. Essentially the market has not been giving us great clues.
Let's move on then and, as with previous articles in the series, I have imposed a BSP price limit of 20.0 or lower for the remainder of the number crunching, to avoid any winners at excessively big odds potentially skewing the bottom line. It still included nearly 40,000 runners so the sample size remained huge.
Sex of horse
There will always be more male runners than females but in bumpers the disparity is less stark than in other disciplines. The splits were:
Males edged it in terms of strike rate, but overall, all the key metrics were very similar. It should be noted that losses on the Betfair Place market have been far worse for female runners.
Age of horse
Let me move onto the age stats now. Below are the A/E indices across different ages:
The sweet spot seemed to be with five-year-olds in terms of these figures. The below table covers a broader set of metrics:
Five-year-olds
As can be seen, five-year-olds had the best figures across all metrics. Not only that, this age group was profitable on the Betfair place market as well, to the tune of £82.12. Compare this to four-year-olds who would have lost us £176.80 on the place market. Overall, horses aged three or four seemed to be at a slight disadvantage, which may simply be down to lack of experience or physical maturity in general.
Five-year-olds were very consistent, which can be seen when viewing their yearly win strike rates:
In the last five seasons their strike rate has been virtually the same, with figures between 19.1 and 19.8%. Not only that, when we compare their A/E indices across the eight years, they have all been over the magic 1.00 figure suggesting good value in each year:
Sticking with five-year-olds, it does seem that experience counted for something because if we focus on runners in this age group who had at least two previous racecourse starts their record was 250 wins from 1123 runners (SR 22.3%) for a profit of £147.37 (ROI +13.1%). Meanwhile, five-year-old male runners outperformed their female counterparts, winning 633 times from 3160 runners (SR 20%) for a healthy profit of £221.47 (ROI +7%).
Country of Breeding
I want to look now at some data focusing on the country of breeding. The main country's break down as follows:
We see similar strike rates for the three main countries of Britain, Ireland and France which often is the case. German-bred runners were far less common but had the highest strike rate. French-bred runners proved relatively poor value overall, while the Irish-bred results were a notch above the rest from a betting perspective. This Irish-bred edge was replicated in the Betfair Place market as the table below shows:
It should also be noted that Irish bumper runners aged five and up produced a return in the win market of just over 7p in the £.
Older French-bred runners have been quite rare, but when aged six or older their record has been poor thanks to 19 wins from 123 (SR 15.4%) for a loss of £36.64 (ROI -29.8%).
Position Last Time Out (LTO)
A look next at some LTO data focusing on the most recent run of the horses in question looking a position the horse finished last time out.
LTO winners made a small loss, while all other groups somewhat surprisingly all proved profitable.
At this point I would like to share the results for horses who had not previously run and hence were making their racehorse debut. This cohort was obviously a big one with 5620 runners in total. Of these, 881 were successful for a strike rate of 15.7%. Losses to £1 level stakes stood at £231.80 (ROI -4.1%); A/E 0.96.
Trainers
Trainer data is always a favourite of racing fans so let’s see what we can find. In the table below all trainers who had at least 60 runners in the study period are shown. The trainers have been ordered alphabetically:
18 of the 43 trainers made a blind profit during the timeframe, while nine managed A/E indices of 1.10 or higher.
From this initial starting point, let me breakdown some of the data, starting with a look at trainer performance when the horses have started favourite. Below is a graph sharing the ROI%s where to qualify a trainer must have saddled 40 or more market leaders.
There are some real fluctuations regarding these figures. Harry Fry has had an excellent record with favourites. His ROI of +32.3% came from 21 wins from 46 (SR 45.7%) for a profit to £1 level stakes of £14.87, A/E 1.29. Jamie Snowden was another to have excelled when it comes to market leaders - 25 wins from 50 (SR 50%) for a profit of £11.19 (ROI +22.4%); A/E 1.29. In contrast, Fergal O’Brien has had a poor record with his bumper favourites losing over 19p in the £. His strike rate of 29.1% (35 wins from 119) was lowest of all the trainers shown in the graph. Nicky Henderson’s stats for bumper favourites have also been relatively poor. His record reads 57 wins from 161 (SR 35.4%) for a loss of £15.87 (ROI -9.9%); A/E 0.93.
Debut vs 2nd start
I would like to look now at individual trainer performance comparing horses making their racecourse debuts with horses that had run once previously. To help give us a benchmark, the overall figures for all trainers were as follows:
As we can see from these figures there was a clear improvement for second starters compared to debut runs so we would expect most trainers to conform to that type of pattern.
I have put the individual trainer data in a table comparing win strike rates, ROI percentages and A/E indices. Anything highlighted in ‘blue’ is a positive, anything in ‘red’ a negative. My criteria for each, was as follows:
By colour coding it helps us to compare the data sets a little more easily.
There are few trainers I would like to comment upon.
- Harry Fry had an excellent overall record in bumpers over this period and performed extremely well with debutants so keep an eye out for those.
- Alan King’s profile is similar to Fry with his debutants clearly outperforming those having their second start.
- The trainer combo of Lucinda Russell and Peter Scudamore (and now with Michael Scudamore) had an excellent record with debutants, producing returns of close to 32p in the £; A/E 1.14. Second starters, though, struggled losing 36p in the £; A/E 0.70.
- Chris Gordon’s second starters improved markedly in terms of win rate. Their strike rate went up from 15.7% to 28.6%. Second starters proved extremely profitable, too, with returns of 84p in the £.
- Nicky Henderson’s debutants had a decent win rate, but they were overbet based on losses equating to nearly 20p in the £. His runners definitely improved for the experience, and his second starters broke even.
- Messrs. McCain, Murphy, Pauling and Snowden are four trainers to note with second time starters; their runners seemed to come on a lot for the debut run.
Trainer Track Stats
To finish off, there are a handful of trainers who have produced impressive bumper stats at specific courses. They are listed below (ordered by number of runs):
There are some very impressive numbers in this table, although we need to be aware that some of the sample sizes were quite small. Having said that, I will be keeping an eye out for these trainer/course combos this winter.
**
And that concludes the fifth and final article in this series. It's another one chock full of stats that should point us in the right direction in terms of potential bumper bets over the coming months.
Good luck!
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Cookie_Taunton.jpg320830Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2025-10-28 04:43:372025-10-22 15:50:54Prepping for NH 2025/26, Part 5: National Hunt Flat
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, writes Tony Stafford. Save an accent or two – if cedillas and circumflex accents can be found on my keyboard, they’ve escaped me so far – but you get my drift. And I’m not going to lead off with Futurity win number 12 and an eighth British flat-race trainer’s title for Aidan O’Brien either.
It’s 25 years since my The Daily Telegraph Pocket Racing Guide, with the secondary title of the Inside Track on Horseracing, was published by Collins Willow, with a much-valued foreword by Henry Cecil.
Back then I took the opportunity to select three figures who I thought had been fundamental in making a major impact on the sport at the end of the 1990s. In bookmaking, it was Victor Chandler, who is no longer associated with the BetVictor brand that he developed.
Victor was far-sighted in transferring his business to Gibraltar, offering a cut-price betting tax rate of three per cent along with free telephone calls to his UK clients, rather than the nine per-cent prevailing at the time in the UK. Now, it seems, the desperate Rachel from accounts, Chancellor of the Exchequer, wants to bring back a tax on all betting on racing, off-course and on.
Then I picked Lord Hartington, who four years later inherited the title, Duke of Devonshire. ”Stoker” as he is universally known, was the man who presided over the transfer of racing power from the Jockey Club to the British Horseracing Board (now Authority), and as I suggested, was one of the trio that helped drag the sport from the 19th into the 21st Century.
Why plus ca change, then? Well number three was Peter Savill, then the recently appointed boss of the fledgling BHB, whom I described all those years ago as “much-criticised but highly independent … and the ideal man to preside over the technological revolution.”
Savill’s premise at the time was that racing needed to receive a greater share of betting revenue. Twenty-five years on, the issue remains the same and the news this weekend that Savill, along with UK racing’s most winning trainer Mark Johnston, have both joined the board of the Racehorse Owners Association, promises to shake things up.
He says he joined the board, on Johnston’s suggestion, as he felt it would give him more influence than he has managed to achieve with his own Professional Racing Association. He said that racecourses’ attitude seemed to be: “You’re not part of the industry.” “Well now we are!”
Savill, who ran the BHB for six years, promises to be unashamedly “strident”, a word often attributed to him as he enters his new role. The owner of Plumpton racecourse and a horse owner for many years, with a good few of them with Mark Johnston, he’s never been frightened of shaking a few trees, so the other disparate strands of racing’s establishment might well have a serious standard-bearer to line up alongside.
Peter’s aim remains the same: increasing prizemoney and he has firm ideas on how to move towards that ambition. I wish him well and have no doubt that he and co-new boy Mark of the 5,000 plus wins and the “Always Trying” slogan, will never give up in helping achieve their admirable objectives.
**
Okay, so now to Aidan O’Brien. It was salutary that only two UK-trained horses contested the final Group 1 race of the UK season at Doncaster on Saturday and even more so when those two had already been left toiling and trailing after the two-furlong mark.
The Futurity has now been won by O’Brien for his Coolmore partners in 12 of the last 27 years. This time, the one-two-three of Hawk Mountain, Action and Benvenuto Cellini pushed him comfortably over the £8 million plus earnings which put him £800k clear of the persistent Andrew Balding, The latter would have provided one possibly more dangerous challenger in Item, but unsuitably testing ground caused his absence.
Hawk Mountain was promoted immediately after to 8/1 favouritism for the Derby next June, supplanting Benvenuto Cellini, but with so many smart staying types in his stable, it seems foolish to want to commit to backing any of them at this stage.
To illustrate that point, the winner Hawk Mountain was one of 37 juveniles (25 colts) listed in the O’Brien team of juveniles to be sired by their recently deceased champion stallion Wootton Bassett. Second and third are among ten by Frankel in that list. Frankel, unbeaten in his 14 races for Sir Henry Cecil, is of course a son of the peerless Galileo who died three years ago. No wonder the team has been keen to acquire progeny from that Juddmonte stallion.
So then it was off to France yesterday and Saint-Cloud where the two feature races, both Group 1 contests for two-year-olds, were the target. The Criterium International and Criterium de Saint-Cloud, over one mile and one and a quarter miles respectively, each had multiple O’Brien runners. Also each carried a winner’s prize equivalent to £118k.
Unsurprisingly, Puerto Rico, the mount of Christophe Soumillon, started the short-priced favourite in the International following his easy success in the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardere on Arc Day. He lived up to that with a comfortable success, by almost two lengths from Jean-Claude Rouget’s Campasite. It almost goes without saying that he is another by Wootton Bassett and will be a contender for next year’s 2,000 Guineas.
As I mentioned earlier, it might be foolish to move too soon in Derby betting. One at least as convincing contender must be Pierre Bonnard. The recent Zetland Stakes winner over 1m2f at Newmarket had the proven stamina to win the Criterium de Saint-Cloud over the same trip and showed it along with a great finishing burst to draw easily clear. A double then for Belgian rider Soumillon, at his best on his normal hunting ground.
While O’Brien has more than £8 million earnings when top in the UK and Euro 7m in his home country, yesterday’s double keeps him in a clear third behind Francis-Henri Graffard and Fabre with more than £4.5 million in France – thus in total around £20 million in Europe’s three main racing nations.
Earlier the Prix Perth went to a less fashionable UK-based team, that of trainer David Loughnane and jockey Laura Pearson. The Shropshire-based handler’s five-year-old mare Sparks Fly, a non-winner previously in 2025 but successful at this Parisian track last November, won this Group 3 race very easily from the Andre Fabre-trained favourite. Sparks Fly clearly loves it when the mud flies!
Incidentally, if you would love to own a colt by Wootton Bassett, there are five slated on the first day of Tattersalls October Horses in Training sale, due to be offered today. They are Choir Boy (lot 87), Grafton Street (91), Ex Animo (226), Estoublon (229) and Genealogy (293).
The highest-rated in the draft are Mount Kilimanjaro (by Siyouni), lot 300, rated 110 and Shackleton, a staying son of Camelot (296) who is officially rated 108. If you are planning a trip there to try to buy one of these, remember withdrawals are possible up until time of sale.
With some opportunities later in the year beckoning in the Far East, O’Brien is limbering up with a potent force for the Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar on Friday and Saturday this week. I’m sure the Editor has given you plenty of his thoughts to excuse my not delving into matters too deeply, but such as Precise, True Love, Gstaad, Minnie Hauk, The Lion In Winter and Bedtime Story offer lots of potential to say the least.
- TS
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/HawkMountain_G1Futurity_2025.png320830Tony Staffordhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngTony Stafford2025-10-27 19:13:532025-10-27 19:13:53Monday Musings: Plus Ca Change
This the fourth article in a series looking forward to the National Hunt season, writes Dave Renham. In the opening part, linked to below, I discussed novice hurdle races, and today I am going revisit the hurdle theme but this time we'll be looking at all other handicap hurdle races. Essentially this will include all handicap hurdle races without the term ‘novice’ in the title.
As throughout this series, data has been taken from 1st January 2018 to 31st August 2025 with profit and loss calculated to the Betfair Starting Price (BSP) with a 2% commission applied on any winning bets. Only UK NH races have been researched so this does not include Irish racing.
On average there have been just over 1000 qualifying races per year, so we have a good sample size to review. I will start by examining the betting market.
Market factors
Betfair's market rank data shows the following:
Favourites made a small profit across the time frame, and it is interesting to see the A/E index broken down by time of year/months. Grouping months in pairs (e.g. January & February, March & April, etc) revealed this:
From September to April, the A/E indices were strong across the board. In the summer months, when there is less NH racing, the figures were low in comparison. [Readers may note that Peter May's SR figures are not produced on site between June and August because the data is considered less reliable at this time]
The betting returns (ROI%) correlate with the A/E indices as the following graph shows:
Anyone backing favourites from September to April over the period of study would have ended up doing quite well. If we had backed handicap hurdle favourites blind in the eight months 'non-summer months' from 2018 onwards profits accrued to £286.92 from £1 level stakes.
Having looked at the market, it is time to move on to other areas. As with the first three articles, I am going to impose a BSP price limit of 20.0 or lower from now on, to avoid any winners at excessively big odds potentially skewing the bottom line.
Sex of horse
There will always be more male runners than females and the ratio in handicap hurdle races was around 3:1 over the period of study. The findings are shown in the table:
Both sexes achieved similar win rates but, overall, female runners offered better value. However, fillies - female runners aged three or four - struggled, albeit from a modest sample. 597 fillies raced in these contests with 58 winning (SR 9.7%) for hefty losses of £202.20 (ROI -33.9%); A/E 0.68.
Age of horse
Let me move onto the age stats now. We saw that younger female runners struggled and, overall, that has been the case for both sexes as the table below shows:
Male runners aged three or four lost over 16p in the £, not as much as the fillies but still a steep loss. Horses aged five made a small blind profit and, looking across all metrics, five and six-year-olds showed a solid record.
The older brigade, those aged ten and up, made a fair profit with a decent A/E index of 1.09. Backing all these older runners to place on Befair was profitable also. Perhaps some punters ignored their chances based on age and hence they started slightly higher prices than their true price point. Sticking with the 10-year-olds, they performed even better over shorter distances of 2m4f or less. Their record with this distance requirement was 176 wins from 1328 runners (SR 13.3%) for a healthy profit of £204.62 (ROI +15.4%); A/E 1.13. On the place market the profit was also solid at £85.07. Based on this recent evidence, 10-year-olds may offer some value in the months to come.
Country of Breeding
I want to look now at some breeding data next with focus on the country of breeding. The splits were as follows:
American bred runners were rare and their record was poor. There was not too much in it in terms of the three main countries of Britain, Ireland and France, although the Irish figures read slightly better. German breds made a very small blind profit, as they did on the Betfair Place market, too (£18.78).
Position Last Time Out (LTO)
A look next at some LTO data focusing on the position a horse finished last time out. Here is the breakdown:
I feel Position LTO is a factor that I should always share but, on many occasions, there has been limited value to be found. Based on these stats horses running third LTO offered punters a minute profit but, in my view, this was likely coincidence and ultimately the finishing position last time offers no real clues to handicap hurdle races during the timeframe.
Days since last run (DSLR)
A look next at how long handicap hurdlers have been away from the track between runs. The ranges are necessarily a little arbitrary, and below is how I've broken them down:
It is rare for me to share these DSLR stats because usually there is nothing clear-cut to note. However, on this occasion there were some strong pointers which the table above shows clearly. Horses returning to the track within three days did really well, albeit from a smallish sample; and those who returned within four to seven days essentially broke even, so quick returners could be an area to keep a close eye on this season.
At the other end of the 'time off' spectrum, horses that were absent from the track for four months or more also turned a fair profit, so I am assuming a similar thing happened here as it did with the 10-year-old and older stats we saw earlier. My guess is that these runners started at prices that were marginally higher than their true price due to a possible ‘fitness bias’.
Trainers
Trainer data is always a favourite of racing fans so let’s see what we can find. In the table below I've listed all trainers who saddled at least 250 handicap hurdle runners during the study period. The trainers are ordered alphabetically:
23 of the 55 trainers made a blind profit during the timeframe, while 12 managed A/E indices of 1.10 or higher. Any of these 12 can be deemed to be trainers that performed well above the average.
On the flip side, a handful of trainers struggled, including Alan King, Martin Keighley, Seamus Mullins and Ian Williams. These handlers look over-bet in such races as a general rule.
From this initial starting point, I wanted to examine trainer performance across different BSPs. To do this I split their results into six price bands:
I wanted to compare A/E indices across said price brackets over the review period. Each trainer needed to have at least 60 runners within each individual price band to qualify and, to appear in the table, the trainer must have achieved that in four or more of the six price bands. Any price band where they sent out fewer than 60 runners was left blank.
Any entry highlighted in ‘blue’ was a positive, anything in ‘red’ a negative. My criteria for this was:
By colour coding it helps us to compare the data sets more easily. Here were the splits:
If we look back at Chris Gordon’s overall record, we can see that it was extremely positive with an overall A/E index of 1.08 and returns equating to just over 20 pence in the £. Hence, it is no surprise perhaps to see him with three ‘blues’ out of five, and indices of 1.00 and 0.93 in the other price segments. Likewise, Tom Lacey, whose overall strike rate was above 23% with returns of 28.9% and a 1.26 A/E index, had four ‘blues’ out of five with the other A/E index above 1.00 at 1.03.
Seeing that type of positive consistency across different price bands makes Lacey’s overall stats even more impressive. Rebecca Menzies, another trainer who had excellent overall stats, achieved four ‘blues’ out of five. She, along with Gordon and Lacey were trainers to excel during this timeframe and it will be interesting to see if they can replicate this over the coming months. If we combine the results of these three trainers and look at the yearly ROI% returns we see the following:
Seven winning years out of eight – I wonder if system punters might consider combining the three this year and backing all such runners?
Neil Mulholland attacks handicap hurdles on a regular basis so his overall figures are impressive. In terms of the price bands, he had three ‘blues’ out of six, with the other three indices being 1.00, 1.09 and 0.94. Again, over the past few years he has been a trainer to keep on the right side of, so I am expecting his runners to go well once more this year.
Other positives worth noting are that both the O’Neill stable and the Hobbs/White yard did exceptionally well with shorter prices runners (BSP 3.5 or less). The O’Neill stable had 49 winners from 109 (SR 45%) for a profit of £19.11 (ROI +17.5%); the Hobbs/White had a 50% strike rate thanks to 43 winners from 86 for a BSP profit of £24.86 (ROI +28.9%).
In terms of negatives, Alan King’s overall figures were quite poor, showing losses of over 27p in the £. That manifested as four ‘reds’ out of five. He is not typically a trainer to offer value in handicap hurdles based on these findings.
Summary
Let me finish by placing my interpretation of the main positives and negatives highlighed above in a table, as a sort of handicap hurdle ‘ready reckoner’:
That’s it for this 'NH Prep' deep dive. Next week I'll be taking a look at bumpers, or National Hunt Flat races to give them their full title. Until then...
- DR
https://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/hurdles-generic-scaled.jpg18232560Dave Renhamhttps://www.geegeez.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/geegeez_banner_new_170x78.pngDave Renham2025-10-22 07:21:352025-10-22 07:21:35Prepping for NH 2025/26, Part 4: Handicap Hurdles
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