Tag Archive for: Gavin Sheehan

The ‘Super Six’ NH Jockeys: What Happened Next?

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As a horse racing researcher, there are good days and bad days, writes Dave Renham. On good days I research an idea and find that the data connected with it is interesting and robust enough to dissect and eventually use for an article. On bad days the idea or ideas I research seem to constantly hit a dead end, with the data crunched offering little or nothing of interest to me or potential readers of said research.

The second week in January was a week where I had a few bad days in a row. All my ideas were falling flat or at least after some digging offered up nothing of significant interest. However, just as I was binning yet another idea, I stumbled across some numbers that made me stop in my tracks. Had I eventually found something that had the potential for a worthwhile piece? About half an hour later after testing a few further theories, I felt I did, and hence I will be sharing my findings today.

Rationale

The data for this article has been taken from UK National Hunt racing covering the years 2019 to 2025. Any profits / losses quoted are calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP), with a 2% commission being applied on any winning bets.

For this article, I have been looking at the performance of horses that were ridden last time out by some of the top jockeys in the country. I have chosen the following – Nico de Boinville, Sean Bowen, Harry Cobden, Brian Hughes, Gavin Sheehan and Harry Skelton. These six have had some of the best win percentages of recent years as well as riding a decent number of horses each season, which means we have an excellent initial sample size from which to work.

My initial reasoning for why this angle might prove fruitful was that it is rare for any of these jockeys to ride a complete no-hoper and hence most horses they ride are expected to run well. Of course, there is no guarantee that the same jockey will be on board again next time, but whether they are or are not, one would assume if these horses were expected to run well once, they would be expected to run well next time too. I felt that my reasoning had some sound logic behind it; however, the proof is in the pudding and all that.

 

Overall: horses ridden by Super Six last time out (LTO)

So, first things first, here are the results for all horses ridden LTO by one of my six jockeys in terms of their very next course outing:

 

 

This was an extremely solid – indeed, astounding – starting point producing a sound win rate, with returns edging towards 8 pence in the £. Splitting the results by year produced the following:

 

 

There have been five winning years out of seven, with the two losing years showing only smallish losses. Hence, this simple starting point has been fairly consistent.

Now these results include all possible BSP prices and as we know bottom lines can be massively skewed by big-priced winners. Unfortunately, this set of results does include such winners, with nine of the qualifying horses winning at a BSP of 100.0 or bigger. Backing all horses in triple figures over this timeframe would have yielded 60% of the initial £1572.30 profit figure. Hence, it made sense to ignore those bigger priced runners and focus on a subset of runners at shorter prices. Otherwise, one or more of those 100.0+ winners could be skewing some, or all, of the areas I wanted to explore. I decided therefore that a price limit of BSP 30.0 would be a much better and fairer option. Thus, the remainder of the article is restricted to horses that were priced BSP 30.0 or less.

Let me therefore look at the overall figures for this subset of runners with that BSP 30.0 price cap:

 

 

We have lost roughly 15% of the original qualifiers, but we are still left with a very good sample size, and although the returns are slightly less impressive, a blind profit of over 4p in the £ is still noteworthy.

From this starting point, I wanted to dig deeper, so I began by looking at the yearly A/E indices. The indices presented below are based on BSP rather than ISP, as the exchange prices are more accurate:

 

 

As the graph shows, these horses have offered ‘value’ (A/E 1.00 or bigger) in six of the seven years. Five of the seven years proved to be profitable with the worst year (2022) losing a smidge over 2.5p in the £ across all runners.

 

Handicap vs non-handicaps

A look now at race type; specifically handicaps versus non handicaps. The splits were thus:

 

 

A much higher strike rate has been achieved in non-handicaps, but this is the norm as they tend to be less competitive. All the profits, though, have come from handicap races.

An additional statistic to note is if we restrict the handicap results to horses that had raced in a handicap LTO as well. This specific handicap-to-handicap group produced 9707 qualifiers of which 1693 won (SR 17.4%) for an impressive profit of £974.15 (ROI +10%).

 

Race Class

Let me next examine the Class of Race to see if anything could be gleaned from it. The splits were as follows:

 

 

We can safely ignore the Class 6 findings as there were only 24 qualifiers, and the stats indicate that Classes 3 to 5 have offered up the best returns. The more competitive levels of Class 1 and 2 both showed losses to BSP.

 

Last time out race position

Onto position LTO now. Did that make a difference? Let’s take a look:

 

 

It is not surprising I guess that more than 7,000 of the c.17,500 qualifiers finished first or second LTO, as they were ridden by one of the ‘Super Six’; but a first or second finish last time was actually a negative when it came to next time out value. Conversely, horses that finished third or worse LTO combined to return over 11p in the £. It seems therefore, that this may be the group we should concentrate on in the future as those winners and almost winners last time are significantly over-bet.

 

Jockey change?

My next port of call was to examine the results where any of the six jockeys remained on the same horse next time out, compared with a jockey change which was not one of the six. Here were my findings:

 

 

The value lay clearly with horses ridden this time by a jockey who was not one of the six. Yes, the overall strike rate was lower but the bottom line was significantly better. Also, looking at the yearly splits for this cohort we see positive numbers in six of the seven years, and a negligible loss in the other one:

 

 

What I also found fascinating were the results when we examine the final possible jockey permutation – horses ridden by one of de Boinville, Bowen, Cobden, Hughes, Sheehan or Skelton last time and now ridden by a different jockey from the ‘Super Six’. In other words, a possible scenario being when Sean Bowen had ridden the horse last time, but Harry Cobden was on board this time; or Gavin Sheehan having been on board last time, being replaced by Brian Hughes this time, etc. Here are those findings:

 

 

These results have been extremely positive during the past seven years, so this looks like an avenue we could potentially explore in the future. One positive switch to mention is when Harry Cobden was riding a horse this time after being ridden by Sean Bowen LTO. This ‘combo’ saw 35 qualifiers of which 11 won (SR 31.4%) for a profit of £25.20 (ROI +72%).

[One such switch was when geegeez.co.uk syndicate horse Sure Touch won the 2024 Summer Plate under Cobden after Bowen was required to ride a horse for his father – Ed.]

 

Odds Last Time Out

Moving on, one area I always like to look at where possible is the LTO odds of the horses in question. Below is a graph showing the ROI% splits for different bands of LTO odds – I have used ISP for the LTO odds as the prices are tidier:

 

 

This graph gives us a clear cut steer, with runners LTO that were priced 9.50 (17/2) or higher producing much better returns on their very next start compared with prices LTO of 9.00 (8/1) or less. For the record, horses that were priced 5.0 (4/1) or lower LTO combined to produce blind losses.

 

Age of horse

Finally for this article, I am going to share the age of horse splits, and these are shown in the table below:

 

 

As can be seen, 3yos had a poor record. The double-digit generation also struggled a little when compared with the best range, those aged six to nine. Why this group has done best is probably because National Hunt horses are in their prime between six and nine. Suffice to say horses aged six to nine have clearly offered the best value in the past few years when ridden LTO by one of the Super Six.

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I must admit that the data shared in this piece are far better than I had expected when I embarked upon the research. It will be interesting to see if these generally positive results are replicated in 2026 and beyond.

- DR

Monday Musings: Only The Bold

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I know we’re only halfway through the year; halfway indeed through the decade and barely a quarter into the 21st Century, but I think I’ve just seen the ride of said 100 years, writes Tony Stafford. If you reckon you see one better the other side of 2050, don’t bother try telling me about it, I’ll no longer be here troubling anyone.

My candidate for this purely unbiased accolade was not on show riding the Irish Derby winner – indeed at time of starting this article, the Classic was more than an hour away from being run. I could have a cup of tea and a piece of cake after presenting my case and before sitting down to watch the main event.

The big one here from three jumps only cards – all to the west of the country – was the bet365 Summer Handicap Chase over 3m2f and 20 (to start with) obstacles. Uttoxeter, at 143 miles, was the nearest to London, Ffos Las is 212 miles and Cartmel in the Lake District is 269 miles, for whatever that useless statistic may be worth!

Sometimes it’s only when you’ve backed the recipient of such a ride, especially when the horse comes from out of the clouds as it were, that the degree of amazement is even noticed. I watched Only The Bold, mostly with minimal expectation during the running, purely as it had been my top bet (not supported by cash, I’m afraid) for my From The Stables line in the William Hill Radio Naps table (and, more importantly, for subscribers of a service with the same name, our dear editor being one of the directors).

The horse, a ten-year-old, was having its third run for the Jamie Snowden stable, having shown plenty earlier in its career but suffering from a lack of confidence which brought three consecutive pulled up runs most recently for David Pipe. It happens to the best of them and, sometimes, a change of yard can often be enough to remedy things.

First time for Snowden, Only The Bold was moving well when a mistake halted his progress at Ludlow – resulting in a fourth consecutive “P” on his form line.

But Jamie took heart from that and even more when he rattled home fast but too late into third at Aintree in May. Another two furlongs yesterday and a mark very much down on his peak figure of a couple of years ago meant the near 40 grand first prize had to come to the shrewd Jamie’s notice.

Fifteen horses lined up, soon to be reduced by one from an unseated, and as the leaders - including the Fergal O’Brien-trained Manothepeople - ensured a fast pace, Gavin Sheehan on Only The Bold never looked especially comfortable.

His horse showed little fluency in his jumping and after the first half circuit was firmly among the tailenders. The proximity for a while of the unseated horse didn’t appear to be helping and that might have been why Sheehan took him to the wide outside.

They were in the back three for most of the way, with the jockey manoeuvring widest of all on each of the pretty sharp left-hand bends. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the many new winner-finding formulae available on the internet hasn’t physically tracked the paths of all the runners (it has - Ed.). I guess he would have gone much the furthest but enjoyed the clearest run thanks to Gavin’s steering.

Four from home at Uttoxeter isn’t all that far out, but Only The Bold was still last and on the outside. Then Gavin got going, and on each of the bends you could see his mount running past a few. Coming to two out the Irish-trained Digby had eased past Manothepeople and was still going well and looking impregnable.

A few lengths behind, Only The Bold was being gently switched inside and at the last fence he was within half a length of the not-stopping leader. Now, I was already expecting the miracle to happen, and indeed it did, the Snowden runner showing the better speed while at the same time stopping yet another Irish invader pilfering a hefty chunk of our prize money.

I say pilfering advisedly. Two runs prior Digby had been brought across to Bangor on the back of some ordinary home form and, supported from 40/1 to 22/1, bolted home, a run that brought a question from the stewards. It was accepted after trainer Dermot McLoughlin cited the longer trip as the reason for the improvement.

A win at home over hurdles in between would have boosted expectations and, apart from Only The Bold’s tenacity, Sheehan’s in-race flexibility, and Snowden’s rejuvenation of an apparently lost cause, they would have been on another 16/1 triumph as well as a nice haul of cash.

If you don’t believe me how unlikely it was until the last fence, have a look at the film, but I’m not bothered either way. Eighteen-to-one winners are like rocking horse’s teeth! [26.0 Betfair Starting Price, traded at 140 in running!]

Next, I’m bringing in an event that was run a few minutes after the Irish Derby as up at Cartmel one trainer listed as having only 18 horses in her care in this year’s Horses in Training book, made it two big-race wins on successive days, one in either discipline.

Dianne Sayer and her assistant, the former jumping amateur rider and daughter of the trainer, Emma, were understandably delighted when their Savrola stayed on too strongly for his opponents to win the two-mile Northumberland Vase, consolation race on the flat to the time-honoured Plate, won by Andrew Balding’s Spirit Mixer.

The Vase carried a big cash upgrade from last year and was worth equal to the prize won by Only The Bold at Uttoxeter. Then, yesterday, the Sayers’ Charlie Uberalles went down to Cartmel and took the Oakmere Homes Handicap Chase and its £22k pot, fending off a trio of well-fancied Irish raiders in the process.

At least there was a numerically strong team from the UK vying for the main prizes in the Irish Derby but, predictably, Ryan Moore and Lambourn landed the odds and added to the horse’s Betfred Derby victory at Epsom.

Lambourn did not make all at the Curragh this time; indeed he was unable to as he was challenged on his inside from the early stages by Richard Kingscote on Sir Dinadan, very much the Ralph Beckett stable’s second string as far as the market was concerned. He kept a ridden Lambourn company until well into the straight when the favourite took over. If we had expected him to draw away from that point we were mistaken, as a later challenge came but not from any of the beaten Epsom contenders, rather from much closer to home.

Serious Contender, another of the Aidan O’Brien/Coolmore contingent, was reappearing only ten days after he was beaten from a mark of 92 in one of the Royal Ascot three-year-old handicaps, and he gave favourite backers a serious fright. One trainer I was speaking to last week was suggesting that finishing even tenth in that mile and a half race or in the Britannia over a mile at the fixture meant you were probably a good way ahead of your handicap mark.

William Haggas, not afraid to run Group 1 horses in handicaps, won the race with Merchant off 90. He went up to 103 last Tuesday and, with his nearest victim then getting so close to the Derby winner in the Irish Derby, he’ll get another jump. I doubt Haggas or the owners, one of Highclere’s syndicates, will mind. If a deal hasn’t already been done, he’ll be on his way before long for a nice few quid.

The last 50 yards or so of the Irish Derby was extraordinary. As the winner edged away from his stablemate, it was only then that Lazy Griff, under William Buick got running for Charlie Johnston and Middleham Park Racing, losing one spot on his Epsom runner-up position. He again had the better of Epsom third Tennessee Stud by a neck while Sir Dinadan was another neck away fifth and Green Impact a nose back in sixth.

That last gasp effort made a €100k difference to the Middleham Park shareholders, but up front another one-two in an Irish Derby brought a heady €950k to the home team. It was O’Brien’s 17th Irish Derby victory, his first coming in 1997. Surely no top-level race anywhere in the world can ever have been so dominated by one stable over such a length of time.

- TS