Royal Ascot fallout and debate rumbles on while the Irish Derby focuses ante-post betting minds

Events / Simon Rowlands / 25 June 2008 / Leave a Comment

Simon Rowlands on draw bias at Ascot and the big one this weekend at The Curragh

Royal Ascot provided topics of discussion aplenty, both on and off course.

Was the colour of Her Majesty's dress salmon or pink? What on Earth is a "fascinator"? When will one of the pundits on ATR or BBC say something remotely incisive?

Then there was the draw, the arguments about which are still rumbling on. Those who maintained that you simply had to be drawn low on the straight course, despite strong evidence to the contrary, finally saw the error of their way after a horse running from stall 28 won the Wokingham on Saturday. But those who maintain that you had to be drawn high OR low are still vocal.

They may have a point. Then again, they may not. Just as it paid to question the herd-like instinct that saw jockeys (and thereafter punters) heading for the stand rail in the Royal Hunt Cup on the Wednesday, it should pay to think again about this particular piece of received wisdom.

The evidence for the middle of the track being slower than the flanks is outwardly persuasive. Horses drawn in the centre finished well back in the Royal Hunt Cup, Britannia, Buckingham Palace and Wokingham, the only handicaps run on the straight course with 20 or more runners. In some races, such as the Golden Jubilee Stakes, those who kept to the middle came off worse than those who raced on the stand side.

Then again, what is the explanation for the fact that many of the fastest relative times of the week came from horses racing in the centre, in races, such as the Coventry and Windsor Castle Stakes, in which the whole field raced towards the centre?

How wide was this "centre"? Just wide enough to accommodate the theories, perhaps.

Even more intriguing was the performance of Tamagin in the Wokingham. Drawn in stall five, he raced stand side initially but hung across to race in the centre from halfway and yet still finished fifth of 27. It is possible that he was disadvantaged to a small degree, but if it was more than that then perhaps we should all be lumping on him to become champion sprinter. In the same race, the winner Big Timer and third King's Apostle ended up near the centre of the course, though only late on.

Where did this "centre" start and end? Just where it needed to, perhaps.

I asked Timeform's 'timefigure' expert Chris Wright what he thought of the idea that the centre of the straight course was slower than the flanks and that times like those recorded in the Coventry and Windsor Castle Stakes (which resulted in excellent Timeform timefigures) were significantly slower than they could have been. "So far as I am concerned there was no bias on the straight course", he said.

It seems to me that people regularly confuse draw and track biases (which occur less than many imagine) with pace and positional biases (which occur all the time and can be very powerful). The reason why handicap "good thing" Bankable lost the Royal Hunt Cup was not because he was drawn 25 of 29, clearly, but because the jockeys on high-drawn horses, in an act of collective ignorance, ceded ground and positional advantage by coming to the stand side. Many jumped to a different conclusion at the time.

On those occasions during the week when a large field split high and low, those drawn in the centre either had to go it alone or sacrifice ground in joining one of the two groups. The latter generally happened, but that is crucially not necessarily the same as a draw or a track bias.

"Going it alone" seems not to be popular with many jockeys, but never lose sight of the fact that it can sometimes be the best course of action for a punter to take.

It was possible to back stalls 20 to 28 in the Wokingham collectively at [8.0] on Betfair's "winning stall" market, by the way...

* * *

I was puzzled, to say the least, by the comment I read in one place that the win of Kingsgate Native in the Golden Jubilee Stakes "suggested that the weight-for-age allowance received by two-year-olds in the Nunthorpe Stakes isn't too generous after all."

You have a choice: you can either make an assumption based on the performances of one young horse who might well have been progressing, or you can trust to the evidence provided by inter-generational comparisons of tens of thousands of race times as to what the "correct" weight-for-age allowance should be at any given point. I favour the latter approach.

* * *

The Irish Derby at the Curragh on Sunday dominates the coming weekend. The race is likely to feature a rematch of the first six from the Derby at Epsom, notably the winner New Approach and second Tartan Bearer, separated by half a length that day.

The Derby was a slowly run race - one of the slowest editions of the modern era as sectionals show - and the pair did even better than the bare result to come from behind with that in mind. There could well be more to come from both of them.

It is, however, worth remembering that, for all that New Approach deserved extra credit for overcoming trouble in-running, a test of speed was more likely to suit a dual Guineas runner-up than a staying-on Dante winner, that it was New Approach's eighth race but just Tartan Bearer's fourth, and that New Approach showed a tendency to pull hard despite getting cover in a bigger field than will be the case at the weekend, whereas Tartan Bearer was admirably tractable.

New Approach is [1.86] and Tartan Bearer [4.5] to back on Betfair's ante-post market. I have sided with the latter.