3 minute read

Racing And Sports' Adam Blencowe highlights the first of his 'Horses To Follow' into this spring with the three-year-olds the first to come under notice.

As the new season approaches we are bound to partake in predictions about the racing year ahead.

One group of horses that is typically subject to wide ranging, and often wide of the mark, forecasts are the early three-year-olds.

Given the limited amount of information/form we have about this group making solid predictions might look a tough ask.

However, history shows that we might already know enough about the early three-year-olds to make solid forecasts.

In the last two-decades 90-percent of Caulfield Guineas winners have been seen at two, with 80-percent of winners putting up a ‘smart level of form’ in the opinion of Timeform.

Timeform’s methods have a long history of providing the framework for making good forecasts.

That research shows a strong correlation between Timeform ratings and future success should hardly come as a surprise, but it is worth noting, and certainly dismisses any thinking that handicapping is ‘guesswork’ or that horse-performance can’t be accurately measured.

What may be more surprising is just how quickly Timeform’s assessments start to become a powerful predictive tool.

Going back to 2008, 64-percent of juveniles who run to a Timeform rating of 110 or above within their first two starts have gone on to win at Group 1 level.

50-percent of that group have trained-on to win a Group 1 in subsequent seasons and when we remove the horses who failed to race on past their juvenile season that figure rises to 69-percent, with 18 horses from that select group winning at the top level as an older horse.

After just a couple of observations Timeform’s ratings are already able to be used to make solid predictions about horse’s future performance.

This goes someway to dispelling the myth that two-year-old racing fails to translate into subsequent seasons.

Of course there are horses in this group who failed to deliver on early promise but for every Raceway is a Pierro, for every Shelford a Spirit Of Boom. In fact, over the last five years there have been two hits for every miss.

Looking at this seasons two-year-old crop there are eight horses that fit this profile.

One, the 114-rated Fighting Sun, has already been retired to stud after injury.

Two of them, Mossfun and Earthquake, have already translated their fast starts into success in the top flight.

Rubick, Jabali, Risen From Doubt, Law and More Radiant make up the eight.

These horses are clearly well ahead of the average galloper, and can be expected to go on to play key roles in major races through the spring, but they are still only lightly raced and the range of possible outcomes for their futures is remains vast.

Sports punters/forecasters face many similar scenarios when they look towards a new season and regression techniques that are commonplace in sports can be similarly applied to horses when looking to make predictions about future performance.

Often we intuitively make comparisons between past and current horses and it’s not an entirely hopeless exercise.

Events of the past are as good a guide as any to those of the future and horses often follow familiar paths.

Taking a series of past horses with similar ratings profiles we can project a range of possible outcomes, and based on that range narrow down to the most likely scenario’s going forward.

We can then use race standards to plot where this range lands relative to a horse’s likely targets and arrive at a solid prediction of their likely performance.

Going back to our select group of horses rated 110 or better after two starts and one in particular projects strongly heading towards the spring.

More Radiant has had just the two starts to this point but both of them have shown her to be way above average and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that she can spiral upwards from her current rating of 113p.

She’s a horse to be following into this season and one highly fancied to make her mark at the top level in the spring.

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