Watch And Learn: Graeme North timefigure analysis

The history of Britain’s racecourses and races, either current or defunct, is a topic that has always fascinated me (Halifax, where I live, had a racecourse until 1884 on land now used by own of the town’s golf’s courses) and the section devoted to Ayr in J. Fairfax-Blakeborough’s painstakingly researched ‘Northern Turf History’ volume IV, which focusses solely on racing in Scotland, runs to 34 pages.

Blakeborough writes that the first Ayr Gold Cup was run in 1804, had just three runners, took place over two miles, was confined to horses bred and trained in Scotland and had conditions that gave weight allowances to ‘those by untried stallions, or out of mares that never bred a winner’.

The Scottish Turf isn’t the closed shop it once was, of course, and it’s surely a source of some frustration that the locals haven’t had a winner of their flagship race since Roman Warrior in 1975.

Scottish trainers fared well at the three-day meeting, winning eight races in total with Jim Goldie bagging six of them but they could muster just one entrant in the Gold Cup, nine-year-old Jordan Electrics who finished eleventh at 25/1 racing off a mark just 1lb lower than he had when fifth in the race 12 months previously despite failing to finish in the first four in any of his five preceding races this season.

For all its absorbing history - it was only in 1908 after the course moved to its current venue that it became a six-furlong race - it seems to me the Ayr Gold Cup is not attracting the quality of runner it used to do.

That deterioration in quality might not be immediately apparent or want attention drawing to it by either the racecourse executive or sponsors (Ladbrokes this year) but it’s there in the figures all the same.

Between the years 2011 and 2016, the minimum official rating needed to secure a spot was no lower than 96 and as high as 98, with the maximum official rating in that same period varying from 108 to 114.

Since 2022, the minimum official rating needed to get in has not been above 93 and was as low as 85 in 2022 when three horses rated 87 or lower scraped into the race, while the maximum official rating this year dropped as low as 104.

Candy eclipses Gold figure

Not only that, but in two of the last three years, the winning time for the Ayr Gold Cup has been slower than it has been for the Ayr Silver Cup, the ‘consolation’ race for those horses who haven’t managed to get into the big one – indeed, this year’s Gold Cup winner Run Boy Run won the race in 72.52 seconds, 0.25 seconds slower than it had taken stablemate Candy to win the Silver Cup.

Run Boy Run’s winning timefigure was just 89, the lowest in the race this century behind Significantly in 2023; in contrast, Candy posted a 105, a timefigure that been bettered only three times since 2000.

Of the four Group or listed races held at the meeting, only one produced a timefigure of note, the 100 recorded by Karl Burke’s Beautiful Diamond in the Scottish Sprint restricted to fillies; the other three races, the Firth Of Clyde, the sole Group race at the meeting, salvaged a poor meeting for Richard Fahey with Catching The Moon winning in 91; a very poorly-contested Harry Rosebery went to Adrian Keatley’s Chairmanfourtimes (who had been beaten in a Beverley nursery on his previous start off an official mark of just 79) in 82, while the Doonside Cup went to Andrew Balding’s Almeric in a lowly 81.

Not an awful lot of quality there, to be honest, and not a lot of value in the betting ring either with an Industry Starting Price overround of 147% in the Ayr Gold Cup and 144% in the Ayr Silver Cup, both significantly higher than they had been as recently as 2021.

Mill Reef clash delivers at Newbury

The most interesting race of the weekend promised to be not at Ayr but down at Newbury where there was a David and Goliath type clash between the big guns of Godolphin and Sheikh Obaid and the Jim Boyle-trained Into The Sky who had created a very favourable impression when winning a maiden at the same track a month previously by seven-and-a-half lengths in a 98 timefigure that I’d assessed cautiously given the unusual six-and-a-half furlong distance.

Into The Sky was bought into subsequently by racing royalty in the shape of the Tabor family and showed himself to be one of the best juveniles around at six furlongs, taking up the running after a couple of furlongs but throwing away what looked a winning advantage inside the last after hanging left to go down by a length to the Charlie Appleby-trained Words Of Truth who put his greater experience to good use to notch his third win on the bounce.

The pair came over four lengths clear and recorded timefigures of 111 and 107 respectively, which puts Words Of Truth not only at the top of the six-furlong juvenile list, 2lb above Gstaad, but top of the figures recorded by juveniles across all distances this season.

The other Group race on Newbury’s Saturday card, the World Trophy, was won in a 104 timefigure by First Instinct, an improved display on the face of it on the softest ground he’d encountered but also at a potential positional advantage close to the stand rail.

Gowran Park is a place I usually associate more with the winter game than the summer game, but the Group 3 Lanwades Stud Fillies Stakes usually takes a smart performance to win it and I’ll be surprised if its latest winner Faiyum doesn’t turn out to be the best of its recent winners.

Backed into odds on in a 14-runner field despite not having run for three months (she had been last seen finishing second to Barnavara in a Group 3 at Naas) Faiyum might have had the best of the draw but she had the race won well before the turn for home, setting a strong gallop she never relented, eventually scoring by seven lengths in an impressive 112 timefigure.

A home-bred daughter of Frankel, she would have been a big player in the upcoming Prix de l’Opera had she held an entry, but connections stressed afterwards how much she had grown over the summer and seem content to look forward to what they hope will be a wet summer next year.

After getting myself up to date on the train into the office last week the highly-readable ‘Curry-Heute…More than just a Glasgow Curry Blog’, an ongoing critical review of worldwide curry establishments that must now number at least 2000 visits, a prolific journey that even the author ‘Hector’ admits has seen him gain not inconsiderable weight since he began it all ten years ago, I also caught up with Simon Rowlands’ latest Expert Analysis blog.

I didn’t find myself disagreeing much with the conclusions reached in his piece about the contestants in the one French race under review, the Prix du Prince d’Orange, but I’m not inclined to believe that the winner’s finishing speed came in anywhere near the 119.5% from 400m out Simon mentioned in his piece.

That’s a perfectly fair conclusion to draw if you take the finishing splits and race distance at face value but given the rail was out 20 metres at Longchamp the overall race distance was almost certainly much closer to 2100m than 2000m albeit very hard to pin down exactly.

That’s the sort of huge unreported additional yardage that often crops up late in the year at Saint-Cloud and is a reminder that data from French racetracks, for all it looks comprehensive, is nowhere near as reliable as it seems.

Indeed, anyone delving into Croix du Nord’s stride data which is freely available in the same spot, his sectionals were published would have seen he supposedly took 31 strides in his fastest section of the race, the penultimate 200m, at the same time Daryz, who was having to manoeuvred from behind horses to the wide outside, supposedly took only 20, figures which would give the winner a stride length of just over 21 feet and the runner-up approaching 33!

‘Soyez prudent’ as they say in France.

Sad passing of former colleague

It was sad to learn last week of the passing of my former Timeform colleague Geoff Greetham. For all he was one of Timeform’s old school - he was already a youngish director when I joined the organisation in November, 1983 - he was also one of the new school too and besides being an outstanding writer was an early and vociferous proponent of the benefits of creative handicapping (rearranging the finishing order to better reflect events when circumstances demand it), predictive ratings (attempting to assess first-time out performance by combining multiple inputs among other things such as pedigree, trainer and foaling date) and sectional timing, just three areas in which Timeform went on to lead the field in racing analysis.

Knowing I was taking my first tentative steps into the world of handicapping two-year-olds in 1987 when faced with assessing the Brocklesby, back then the first juvenile contest of the season, he’d taken the trouble to watch the race and asked how I was going to assess one of the runners which had met significant trouble in running.

When I told him I had rated it two lengths closer (horses who’d been badly hampered historically only ever got a ‘+’ symbol next to their rating, even if the case for the prosecution was clear-cut) I can still him punching the air and exclaiming “finally!”.

A full tribute to Geoff from my colleague David Cleary (who joined Timeform in the same month and year I did) can be found here.

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