Irish St Leger day at the Curragh, the second half of Irish Champions Weekend, and four Group 1s in a row through the middle of the afternoon: the Moyglare for the two-year-old fillies, the Flying Five for the sprinters, the National Stakes for the two-year-old colts and the Irish St Leger itself, with the Blandford and two big handicaps around them. The thread running through this card is that our database has already staged most of it. The Moyglare and National Stakes principals met in the Phoenix Stakes. The Flying Five field met in the Nunthorpe and the King George Stakes. The St Leger runners have run their trials against each other at Navan, at Leopardstown and here. Where the horses have met, we show the figures they ran against each other; where they have not, we show the numbers that say who should.
This guide reads all eight races through our model, and it works the way our coverage always works: the framing of every race is open to everyone, a free account unlocks the complete analysis, and members get the live data tables underneath, the same percentages, ratings and pace maps the dashboard runs, updating through the day. Along the way we explain the figures as we use them, because the point of these guides has never been a list of horses to follow. It is showing how data narrows big fields to the two or three worth your attention, and letting you take the method anywhere.
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TPR (Total Performance Rating) is EquiAnalytix's proprietary rating, built from a database of more than 836,000 runs. Every horse's number is derived from race times adjusted for class, going, pace and race shape, so it measures what a horse actually did rather than what the handicapper thinks of it.
Every horse in a race holds a TPR percentage and every field sums to 100, so the numbers read like the model's own market. Across our whole database, 73 percent of winners come from our top four ranked horses, which is why the top of the list is where every read begins.
The direction a horse's figures are moving, measured in points across recent starts. Warm positive trends mark improvers the handicapper has not caught; cold negative ones mark horses the season may have passed by. Paired with the volatility measure, it tells you whether a profile is climbing, sliding or simply erratic.
Sire, sire-juvenile and damsire figures measure how a stallion's stock perform as a population: at today's trip, on today's ground, or as two-year-olds before their own form exists. In unexposed fields they are the closest thing racing has to projecting a ceiling from a bloodline.
Going, track and distance figures isolate a horse's best performances under today's exact conditions. A high going figure on Good ground matters far more than a career best earned in a bog, and a big track figure says this course specifically brings out the horse's best. Context matters too: a figure earned on winter all-weather must translate before it counts on turf.
Each runner's early-position style is profiled from its history, and the race pace forecast adds them up. High numbers mean contested speed and favour those who can sit just off it; very low numbers mean a crawl and favour the prominent. At York specifically, two decades of data say front-runners outperform expectation, especially in sprints.
The gap between the official mark a horse carries today and the mark it last won from. Small numbers mean the handicapper has not yet punished the horse for winning; negative numbers, the rarest and best kind, mean he has relented below it. Across our database, handicaps disproportionately go to the small end of the scale.
A trainer's one-month figure against their twelve-month baseline. A yard running twenty points above its own normal level is enjoying a genuine hot streak, and our data says those streaks persist long enough to matter. But hot stables still send out cold horses: check the individual's trend before borrowing the yard's.
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Twenty-six sprinters over six furlongs on Yielding ground, and the second day of Irish Champions Weekend opens with the kind of handicap where a data model earns its keep. Every horse in the race carries a share of our model's confidence, and the field always adds up to 100, so a share of 12 in a field of 26 is a strong opinion: the model has two of them, SONDAD and BEAR ON THE RUN, with COUL ANGEL and DARK THIRTY next on 8. Behind the shares sit the numbers we build them from. Every run a horse records earns a performance figure, built from the clock and adjusted for the class of the race, so that a 150 in a Curragh handicap and a 150 in a Group race mean the same thing. Our engine then keeps a running estimate of each horse's true ability from every run and every beaten length, and separately tracks its current operating level, which is that ability plus or minus the form of the moment. And for a sprint handicap we lean on the handicap profile: the OR delta, which is the gap between today's mark and the mark a horse last won from, and the direction the assessor has been moving it. Those four lenses, plus one fact about the course, are the race. And because a new reader is entitled to ask how good the model is before trusting a share: across 836,398 runners rated walk-forward, its shares sit within 0.07 percentage points of the real win rate, and its top four contain 73 per cent of winners.
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Sixteen two-year-olds over six and a half furlongs for one of the richest sales races in Ireland, and a field that lets us show two very different kinds of data at work: hard form figures for the eleven that have raced, and breeding figures for the five that have not. The model's shares run STAR OF STATE 31, ATLANTIC BRIDGE 18, MEHMAS STAR 15, LORD RAGNAR 7, SWITCHING SIDES 6, and it is worth pausing on that 31, because only two horses on the whole card, in the Moyglare and the Irish St Leger, are given bigger shares. For the unraced, our breeding figures do the work the form book cannot: every sire and damsire in our database carries a progeny average, the mean performance figure of all their runners, plus a separate juvenile figure for how their two-year-olds run, and every dam carries the average of her own foals. Those numbers are how a data model prices a horse that has never seen a racecourse, and the same sire, dam and damsire averages sit beside every horse on our race cards, raced or not.
The first of the day's four Group 1s is a race our database has already run, twice: SUN GODDESS has beaten GREEN EMPRESS on both occasions they have met, over six furlongs here in May and again in June. The ground is Yielding and the field is seven, and it includes IBELIEVEICANFLY, who finished fourth at Leopardstown on Saturday and is declared to run again twenty-four hours later. The model's shares run SUN GODDESS 42, ALPHA 17, IBELIEVEICANFLY 13, GREEN EMPRESS 11, DANCING DESTINY 8, CONTROLLA 5, BALLINEA STAR 4, and that 42 is the largest share the model gives any horse on Sunday's card. The rest of the ledger is just as useful: four of the field met in the Debutante Stakes over this course and distance three weeks ago, a race our figures scored 131, 128, 126 and 121, ten points covering four horses, which is exactly what the eye said. We also quote the engine's two levels for the principals: an ability level, its long-run estimate of what the horse is, and an operating level, what it thinks the horse is running to right now. Both sit beside every runner on our race cards, and both move as the results come in.
Eleven of the eighteen in the Flying Five race prominently or in front, and that one fact reorganises the whole race. The model's pace forecast, which counts how many runners are likely to go forward early, reads 10 here, the highest on the card (the Moyglare scored 2). We publish it for every race we cover, and in a sprint it is the first line worth reading. In a race like this the parts of the toolkit we lean on change. The engine's ability and operating levels still tell us about class, but run style and the shape of each horse's last two efforts matter more than usual, because a five-furlong Group 1 run at this speed is won by whoever is still accelerating at the furlong pole. The shares are the flattest of the day: COMANCHE BRAVE 15, NIGHT RAIDER 14, MISSION CENTRAL 9, COVER UP 8, JM JUNGLE and TIME FOR SANDALS 6, and the model spreads the rest across the other twelve. Most of the field met in the Nunthorpe at York over five furlongs on Good To Soft on 21 August, where STARLUST, RUMSTAR and TIME FOR SANDALS filled second, third and fourth, and in the King George Stakes at Goodwood on 31 July, where AMERICAN AFFAIR beat RUMSTAR and TIME FOR SANDALS. Between them those two races rank nearly the whole field against each other, and our database holds every one of those figures.
Seven furlongs, Group 1, eight two-year-old colts, and a race our database has largely run already. FLORIDA BAY beat FOLSOM BLUES in the Tyros Stakes at Leopardstown in July. GIANT SEQUOIA beat FLORIDA BAY by a short margin in the Futurity Stakes over this course and distance three weeks ago. DR RASCAL beat HAFFNER in the Vintage Stakes at Goodwood, and HAFFNER beat TREAN in the Acomb at York. And FOLSOM BLUES's biggest figure, a 202, came when he finished a length and a quarter behind SUN GODDESS in the Phoenix Stakes, which is to say that the filly we make the strongest anchor on this card has already measured the top-rated colt in this one. The model's shares run HAFFNER 21, FOLSOM BLUES 18, MONOGRAM 15, GIANT SEQUOIA 14, FLORIDA BAY 11, TREAN 11, DR RASCAL 11, and this is a race where we should be plain about a disagreement inside our own data. The model's top, HAFFNER, has the lowest engine levels and the lowest peak figure of the principals. The figures point to FOLSOM BLUES and the course form to GIANT SEQUOIA, and that is where we go.
A mile and six furlongs, Group 1, seven runners, and two horses who have won the St Leger at Doncaster: SCANDINAVIA last September and JAN BRUEGHEL the year before. The model makes it the second-strongest single case on the card, SCANDINAVIA 40, then QUEENSTOWN 19, ARABIAN FORCE 10, JAN BRUEGHEL 10, TENNESSEE STUD 8, TRUSTYOURINSTINCT 8, LEINSTER 5, and again the database has staged the trials for us. SCANDINAVIA beat LEINSTER in the Vintage Crop at Navan in April and in the Saval Beg at Leopardstown in May. QUEENSTOWN beat LEINSTER in the Irish St Leger Trial over this course and distance three weeks ago. TRUSTYOURINSTINCT beat TENNESSEE STUD in the Curragh Cup over this course and distance in July. For a staying race we lean on two conditions figures we have not used much yet on this card: the distance figure, the average of what a horse has run to at today's trip, and the going figure, the same average on today's ground. Stayers are specialists, and those two numbers separate the ones who have done it from the ones who might.
Three of these fillies finished third, fourth and fifth in the Pretty Polly over this course and distance in June, and our figures do not agree with the order they finished in: RED LETTER third with a 215, THUNDERING ON fourth with a 194, WEMIGHTAKEDLONGWAY fifth with a 205. That disagreement is the way into the Blandford, a mile and a quarter Group 2 for ten fillies and mares and the first race of the day outside the Placepot. A performance figure measures what a horse actually ran to, adjusted for the class of the race, not where it finished in traffic, and a horse whose figure is bigger than its finishing position is usually one to look at again; sorting a race by that figure instead of by the form line is the simplest thing our race cards let you do, and it is where most of these reads start. The model's shares run THUNDERING ON 27, RED LETTER 23, SYMBOL OF MAJESTY 15, WEMIGHTAKEDLONGWAY 10, then a tail from 5 down to 3. Two of the three-year-olds also bring French form, which our database now scores; those figures run hot against the Irish and British scale and we quote them with that caveat. The pace forecast is 5, two confirmed front-runners among ten, an honest gallop rather than a fast one.
Handicaps are where a different part of our data earns its keep, and the Northfields, twenty-three runners over a mile and a quarter for ninety thousand euro, is the flattest race of the day on the model's shares: EASTWATCH 9, AMADEUS MOZART 9, HIGH DEGREE 7, IRON FIST 7, SKY CAPTAIN 7, SUMMER IS TOMORROW 6, then seven horses on 5. For every runner the database holds the mark it last won off and the distance between that and today's mark, the direction the mark is travelling, and the class of race it has been running in against the class of this one, plus the yard's form over the last month against its twelve-month baseline. Those are the numbers that tell you whether a handicapper has caught up with a horse or not, and they are computed for every handicap runner we rate, not only on the big days. The reference race is the Keadeen Hotel Premier Handicap over this course and distance on Good on 23 May, which five of these contested: PERRY MASON won it with a 195, IRON FIST was third with a 199, RETRACEMENT sixth with a 181, FIXATION seventh with a 165 and APERCU tenth with a 173. The pace forecast is 10, the joint-highest on the card, with four confirmed front-runners and a dozen who race prominently, and that shapes the read: this will be run hard, and the horses ridden for a late run are the ones the setup favours.
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