Analyst Graeme North highlights the best jumpers in the 2022 Grand National based on unique Timeform data.
With the Grand National nearly upon us once again it’s a suitable time to return to a topic we have introduced several times before – ‘jumpability’ – to try and narrow the field down on jumping ability.
For any readers unfamiliar with the concept, ‘jumpability’ is, very simply, an attempt to assign a ‘jumping’ rating to a chaser that expresses their jumping ability in the same way that a Timeform rating expresses merit and is calculated by utilising data that exists within the Timeform internal database.
For many seasons now, Timeform has recorded for every performance (where one is deserved) ‘in-play symbols’ – effectively a short-hand notation that indicates noteworthy positive or negative aspects of a horse’s performance such as responding very gamely to pressure (R) or travelling strongly through a race (K). The two symbols that interest us so far as ‘jumpability’ is concerned, however, are x (or X) and j (or J).
Long-time Timeform customers will already be familiar with the x symbol as it sometimes appears alongside a rating (or just by itself in the case of an xx) in the Timeform racecard, signifying a poor jumper. In contrast, a j signifies that the horse jumped well or, if awarded a J, outstandingly well.
So how do the runners in the 2022 Grand National shape up on jumbability ratings?
It should be said that Lostintranslation, the horse with the best jumpability rating, compiled much of his rating between 2018 and 2020 when he was in his pomp and attracting js or Js with abandon. He hasn’t been anywhere near as prolific on that score since, though, and probably isn’t the horse he was for all he won the 1965 Chase at Ascot on his reappearance.
Cloth Cap headed the ‘jumpability ratings’ for the 2021 Grand National and indeed was sent off favourite after winning his Kelso preparation, but he ended up being pulled up. He hasn’t shown the same zest this season and even refused at Ascot two starts back.
Good Boy Bobby and Snow Leopardess, the next two in the list, bring some much better recent form to the table. Good Boy Bobby didn’t seem suited by being held up last time but two earlier wins this season from the front suggest he’ll give a good account even if he has stamina to prove.
Even so his credentials don’t come close to those of Snow Leopardess. Fourth in last season’s National Hunt Chase, her unbeaten three-from-three record this season includes a win over the National fences in the Becher Chase, where she showed her effectiveness in a very big field, and this race has long been her target.
Enjoy d’Allen is perhaps the ‘least good’ jumper among those at the head of the market, but he’s a hard one to judge given that two of his three runs this season have been over hurdles. He jumped adequately when third in a massive field at Leopardstown over Christmas and when occupying the same position in last season’s Irish Grand National. He certainly won’t fail for stamina.
Noble Yeats is a horse I’ve long had my eye on for a decent handicap, and he’s clearly been bought by current connections with this race in mind, but he’s not always been the most fluent over fences and the fact he’ll be ridden by an amateur who hardly rides much these days seems to me a serious negative.
At the time of writing match bets had yet to be priced up, but those markets that pitch one ‘good’ jumper against a ‘poor’ one might be worth seeking out on the day, as might a market around the number of finishers from the Gordon Elliott contingent given the amount of his representatives in the bottom ‘ten’.
How are the ratings devised?
Without going into the complicated methodology that underpins the process, ‘jumpability’ ratings are prompted by allotting a 0 or ‘jump neutral’ value to the horse if they attracted neither an x nor j in-play symbol for a particular race and didn’t fall or unseat; a negative value that correlates to the positive value if they are given an x or a j (and double that for xx or J); falls or unseats are negated or overridden by a j or J symbol, and x's and falls/unseats are not counted twice within the same race.
Those values are then referenced against all the tracks at which the horse has run, as falls, unseats or errors (or good rounds of jumping) need to be placed into context as some tracks are far easier to jump round than others (the table below shows the five courses where the most and least falls and unseats have occurred as a proportion of total runners since 2010).
To come up with the final ‘jumpability rating’, those figures are then adjusted further depending on field size, race distance, race type (‘novice’ or ‘beginners’ races as opposed to handicaps, for example) and underfoot conditions (because longer distance races in the mud are more likely to prompt jumping errors than small-field affairs over short distances on good ground). Horses who have had fewer than eight races are treated as ‘jump neutral’ for each ‘missing’ race so as not to wrongly label a horse either a superb or terrible jumper based on insufficient runs.
It should be stressed at this point that the figures in the table above don’t necessarily translate into the ‘hardest’ and ‘easiest’ jumping tests around. That’s because the figures displayed haven’t been normalised for the distribution by course of novice races compared to handicaps. Sandown Park, for example, is widely seen as a stiff jumping test but frames most of its chases for top-end experienced horses who tend to be good jumpers and cards very few novice events. Were the track to stage a far bigger proportion of novice events to handicaps (as happens at a lot of courses in Ireland, for example), the resulting falls and unseats proportion would be noticeably higher as, by definition, these types of races attract far more fallers.
It’s no surprise that the Grand National course (which also hosts the Grand Sefton, Hunter, Becher and Topham across the course of a year) returns the largest proportion of fallers and unseats. It might not be the fearsome test it was when the fences were much bigger (since 2017 the proportion of fallers or unseats has reduced to one in four or 25%), but it is still a unique test.
Who have been the best jumpers in recent years?
So, which horses have achieved the highest jumpability ratings since 2010? The ‘top ten’ (who must all have had at least ten starts over fences to make the list) are shown in the table below.
The first thing to note is that, not unexpectedly, the best jumpers over the last 11 seasons or so include some very familiar names whose longevity at the top of the tree is in part due to their jumping prowess. One-time stable-companions Altior and Sprinter Sacre dominate the list – the ratings are set on a 100 to -100 scale with 100 being outstanding, 0 being neither good nor bad and -100 appalling – while the leading Irish-trained runner is the memorable Douvan. Allaho and Notebook are two other current Irish horses high up on the list.