The front running performance of Cole Harden ridden by Gavin Sheehan in the World Hurdle captured the headlines on Day 3 of the festival at Cheltenham

Leading from start to finish, in the closing stages up the famous Cheltenham hill, Cole Harden held off challenges from race favourite Saphir Du Rheu and Zarkandar to land a memorable Grade 1 success for the Warren Greatrex yard.

Using our software for horse racing to analyse the other results on the racecard and summarised in the table below, a pattern emerges in respect to the early pace of each of the winners. 

As shown, all of the winners made or were near the early pace in each race.

Using our racing software to review the results from the last 5 years in all race types at Cheltenham in the table above, horses with a ‘Led’ running style perform 38% better than expected (A/E).

With a less than 1% chance that these results are due to pure luck (Chi Scr), when assessing the merits of each horse in the race, our horse racing stats suggest that punters should keep horses that like to run up with the pace in mind when analysing races at Cheltenham.