For a number of years now we have provided post-race statistics for cheltenham races at the festival and this year is no different.

When analysed by our racing software, there are some interesting angles to emerge from the this years statistics, and for those of you who are suffering with post Cheltenham blues, below are the key trends to ease them!

 

Leaders Have a Field Day or Four

This year saw the highest number of leaders in many a year win at the Festival, with 8 leaders winning in the 27 races from a pool of 32 early leaders.

6 of those 8 winners made all or virtually all to win. 

They were Coneygree,Un De Sceaux, Vautour, Faugheen, Uxizandre and Cole Harden and there were 2 or 3 more which nearly made all and were caught just about on the line, namely Milsean and Zabana.

How can we tell if this result is any different to past Cheltenham Festivals?

Well looking at the horse racing statistics, you have to go back to 1997 to get anywhere near this number of leaders winning, which was 7.  

In fact prior to 2014, the number of leaders winning was 1,3,2,2,2,0,2,2,2,2,2,1,1,2,2,7,2, that's 17 years of data on leaders and not one until 1997 coming close to this years count of 8.

Another notable point is 25 of these 32 leaders traded at least half of their odds in running on the exchanges.

 

Country of Breeding

Ireland topped the number of winners (as usual) with 13, followed by France and Great Britain, which is the general order of the list above.

I guess the only notable point is the five German bred losers, the most notable being Don Cossack who was placed 3rd in his race. 

You might say that it isn't significant but when we used our horse race software to look at the last 18 years (1997 to date) there have been only 5 German winners from a pool of 177.  They are performing below expectation by about 50% with the expected winners from that group being 9.64.

There are a few notable casualties in there at short prices. Don Cossack at odds of 5/2 this year and Pont Alexandre a couple of years ago.

USA breds, although having a winner this year don't perform to expectation in the long term, running about 40% below normal.

To put these in context, in the last 18 years IRE, GB and FR bred have all performed around about bang on market expectation.

Headgear

This year there were 17 horses which won without wearing any headgear, which is quite a bit lower than the average of 19.5 over the last eighteen years.

This of course means we had 10 winners wearing some kind of headgear and that's the highest number in the last 18 years.

(The image below is the number of winners wearing some sort of headgear at the last 18 festivals)

In fact you can see from the image above that the trend is for many more horses to wear headgear, which of course is leading to more winners and placed horses.

 

1st Time Headgear

If we delve a little deeper into this years Cheltenham racecards and look at runners wearing some kind of 1st time headgear there is what looks to be a strong pattern emerging.

As you can see from the table above, more runners are wearing some kind of headgear for the first time and more of them are winning, 7 in the last three years compared to 10 winners in the previous 14 years!

 

Watch Out For ... ... ...

Three trainers that are taking advantage of first time headgear are David Pipe with 4 winners from 43 runners, Jonjo O'Neill with 2 from 21 and Alan King with 1 winner from 23 but a further 5 placed.

 

Top Trainers

We all know Willie Mullins easily had the most winners at this year's festival with eight, so our table below shows them in win and place order.

We can see Willie Mullins is still top with 19 horses that won or placed from 54 runners.  That's a 35% win and place strike rate which is remarkable.

Nicholls and Henderson are of course there at the top but the most striking performances are those of four more Irish trainers in Gordon Elliott, Tony Martin, Noel Meade and Henry De Bromhead with win and place strike rates of 40%, 36%, 40% and 42% respectively from very small numbers of runners.

This year everyone who enjoys National Hunt horse racing was treated to some fantatsic and exciting races during the 4 days at Cheltenam. They (and we) cannot wait for next year!