Willoughby’s top 10 under-rated riders

Tuesday 14 August 2012

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The Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup at Ascot is always an excellent chance to see some of the world’s top jockeys. It’s a great occasion, too. But do the results of jockey competitions like it tell us anything about the underlying skills of the riders involved? Is it worth watching with this in mind?

Absolutely not. Six races is way too small a sample to separate the ability of the rider from the merit of the horse. And so are 60 races. Even 600 races are barely adequate to perform the task from a mathematical standpoint.

Yet most racing experts in the press and on television express cast-iron opinions about riders, sometimes on the basis of one or two big-race wins. It can be ludicrous. The best estimate of the difference between the most and least effective riders is only about four per cent of the difference between the fastest and slowest horses. But in closely matched races, that’s a vital edge.

The most effective riders are not necessarily the most stylish, nor the strongest, nor those to be found at the head of the jockeys’ championship.

You can’t always tell by watching a few big races or listening to the experts. Only in the long run can their average effect on racehorses be separated from the quality of their rides.

As punters, we will pay a hefty price if we allow our judgment of jockeys to be swayed by who is champion jockey, or who is simply flavour of the month. The question to which we must find the answer is: which jockeys ride the most winners considering the quality and number of their mounts?

In other words, we must try to put their results into context, so we can judge them according to their actual efficiency, not by a hopeless ‘counting stat’ like wins.

By far the best attempt to do this is by the mathematician John Whitley, whose annual publication Computer Racing Form (Racing Research, 2012) contains a numerical assessment of riding talent that has stood the test of time. The figures are not known for this season yet because the sample size of jockeys’ rides is too small.

But, using my own independent approximation of the same method and projections from past results, my idea of the top 10 most underrated Flat jockeys in Britain is printed on the left.

This is strictly not a list of the best jockeys or the most promising jockeys, and a deal of subjectivity entered my argument upon using the qualifier ‘underrated’. By whom are they underrated, you might reasonably ask?

The list is selected on the basis that their efficiency is well above average and has persisted for at least a couple of seasons. It is more likely to be real rather than the result of randomness or form. Even if these riders have not shown a level-stake profit in the past, their mounts have tended to run better than most jockeys’ considering their chance on form.

A jockey’s level-stake profit for any past interval is, on average, a poor guide to the future profitability of backing his/her mounts because his/her results tend to regress to the mean. By that, I mean there is little or no correlation on average between last year’s profit or loss and this year’s.

Willoughby's top ten

1.   James Doyle
2.   Richard Kingscote
3.   George Baker
4.   Paul Mulrennan
5.   Jim Crowley
6.   Pat Dobbs
7.   Graham Gibbons
8.   Daniel Tudhope
9.   Adam Kirby
10. Francis Norton

Get James Willoughby's weekly column first in Racing Plus every Saturday, and you can get it for half-price here!