Flat Racing: The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about two-year-old foals

Betting Strategy / Simon Rowlands / 18 March 2009 / 8 Comments

Simon Rowlands has pored over the numbers to produce this informative article on foaling dates and the success rates of two-year-olds.

Debunking myths is usually good fun, but when the myths are of your own making it becomes a bitter-sweet experience. That's what I found when researching a piece about foaling dates and two-year-old success rates.

I wrote about this subject some years back, stating that two-year-old winners were foaled only about a week earlier on average than all two-year-old runners and that being an early foal should therefore be considered a negligible advantage.

I looked into the matter again the other day, but this time in greater detail, and came to a rather different conclusion, at least about its effect on results in the opening weeks of the season. This is topical with a new Flat season just around the corner: the Brocklesby Stakes is due to be run at Doncaster on March 28.

For the study I considered all two-year-old races that took place in March and April in the UK in 2006, 2007 and 2008 (a total of 128 races and 1,123 runners) and recorded not only the foaling date of the winners but those of the losers and each horse's foaling date compared to the average foaling date for that race. Age is a relative concept, as I know all too well.

It should be pointed out at this stage that some of the information you will find in the public domain concerning foaling dates is incorrect, especially where USA-bred horses are concerned. Timeform validates all foaling dates independently and can be trusted as a source.

In some respects, my findings seemed fairly unremarkable again. The average foaling date of a two-year-old winner in this period was March 10 and the average foaling date of all runners was March 16. However, a clearer trend became apparent when the data was looked at in a more sophisticated way.

* January foals won at a strike rate of 14.3% and accounted for 52.4% of their rivals (where 50% would be the norm); the figures for February foals were 12.5% and 52.1%; for March foals 12.1% and 49.6%; for April foals 9.3% and 49.0%; and May/June foals just 8.1% and 44.7%.

* In terms of relative age, horses foaled a month or more earlier than the average foaling date of the horses in the race they were contesting beat 53.5% of their rivals, while those that were foaled a month or more later accounted for just 48.1% of their rivals. The oldest horse in each race produced an even more impressive 58.05% of rivals beaten.

* Experience also counted for something, not surprisingly, with horses that had already run accounting for 57% of their rivals. Experience and maturity together was a potent force: those horses that had already run and had 25 or more days in hand of the average foaling date for the race they ran in beat 63.1% of their rivals.

It is good practice to establish whether an effect exists independently of considerations of profitability, in my opinion. There is no reason to expect this particular trend to alter significantly from one year to the next, but profitability depends on the efficiency of the market, which is not only out of our hands but liable to change over time.

That said, the profit/loss to accompany these figures is encouraging in some instances, to say the least. Horses younger than average showed a 30.9% loss on level-stakes invested (557 runs); those that were average or older showed a 10.6% profit (566 runs). January foals (52.9% profit from 98 runs) and foals born 50 days or more before average for the race they were contesting (114.7% profit from 47 runs) fared even better, though these figures owed quite a bit to long-priced winners.

Experience may be beneficial to an early two-year-old's chances (all other things being equal) but it does get factored into its price, and some. Debutants actually showed a small level-stakes profit, whereas horses with experience showed a substantial loss.

Take two-year-old debutants running in March/April, with an advantage in maturity of at least 25 days over their average rivals, and you have horses that have not only historically beaten slightly more rivals than average but also horses that have shown a 43.8% profit on level stakes from a healthier sample size of 175 runners.

And, remember, these returns are at starting price: just imagine how much better they would be at Betfair SP!

I am no fan of so-called systems on the whole, but this is one in which it is easy to follow the logic and to explain the apparent inefficiency of the market (experience is over-valued and accurate information is difficult to come by), so it is one that I intend taking good note of in the weeks ahead.

Comments (8)

1. Paul | 21 March 2009

   Interesting article Simon, plenty of food for thought in there. Cav.

2. Simon Rowlands | 23 March 2009

   Thanks, Paul.

   Interestingly, the first two home in the opening 2-y-o race of the season, at the Curragh on Sunday, were the only two January foals in a field of 12...

3. Robin Keck | 25 March 2009

   Excellent column - somehow it seems more valuable because you don't instinctively like using systems. Can I ask how you obtain this type of information to enable you do the stats? i.e. do you use a specialist software package?

   Robin Keck

4. Simon Rowlands | 25 March 2009

   Thanks, Robin.

   I have used SPSS statistics packages and more complicated Excel approaches for dealing with large data sets before now, and I have dabbled with Timeform-i. But the kind of analysis I am most interested in is bespoke stuff that is not readily available to others and which I extract manually into spreadsheets, e.g. the above and draw analysis.

   Doing things this way is not very "hi-tech" but it does have the advantage of enabling me to target stuff in exactly the way I want to, and to use measures I have developed myself that are more accurate/significant than those widely available.

   Simon

5. Simon Rowlands | 27 March 2009

   An update on the eve of The Brocklesby.

   22 runners have been declared and fully five of them "qualify" in being born 25 days or more ahead of the average foaling date for the race, namely BURTONDALE BOY (Feb 09), EIGHT HOURS (Feb 08), REEL EASY (Feb 07), CHICITA BANANA (Feb 02) and LILY LENOR (a scarcely believable Jan 01, though I have had this double-checked).

   Chicita Banana is the most highly rated horse in the field on sire form, while, of the aforementioned, Eight Hours also scores quite highly on that criterion.

   Over at Kempton, the 4:10 is also a race for 2yos. The average foaling date is Mar 26 and not one horse was born 25 days or more before that. However, OUT THE RING comes first on sire form and is also drawn 11 of 11 on a track at which that has generally been advantageous to a marked degree (see earlier entry about effect of draw at Kempton).

   Simon

6. Cavelloman | 04 April 2011

   Obvious but generally ignored 2 months are worth 8lbs on the WFA scale.

7. Eric D. Doane | 10 April 2011

   Where do you find information on the actual foal date of race horses? Why do you believe that this information is not part of the stated foal date? The information has to be available somewhere. Thanks in advance for your resopnse/s/

8. Simon Rowlands | 10 April 2011

   At the time of the original article, the only way I knew to establish accurate foaling dates was from Timeform - such as in their Black Books or Annuals - or directly from Weatherbys through publications like "Return of Mares".

   At that time, there were many errors in alternative data providers, especially with US-bred youngsters, who tended to default to a January 1st foaling date.

   I do not know if that is still the case, however.