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Following on from comments on another thread I wondered how much significance people placed on the differences in form for horses running left handed against right.
Is it something you would routinely look at when assessing form or is it something you would only take into account when it stood out like a sore thumb?
How significant is it generally?
Are there any good current examples of horses to avoid when they are going a certain way round?
Here’s a few…
Eric’s Charm
Left-handed: 15124F6PPF (2-10)
Right-handed: 11312121P122251U36 (7-18)Lord Henry
Left-handed: 7910F6P3 (1-8)
Right-handed: 411311F4212264 (5-14)The next one is not so well known but looks well handicapped after six straight defeats on unsuitable tracks and is one to look out for next spring/summer…
Rookery Lad
(chase starts only)
Left-handed: 23P51342471111F762 (5-18)
Right-handed: 232F422870357074 (0-16)
Figure-of-8: P (0-1)Are there any good current examples of horses to avoid when they are going a certain way round?
The one that springs to mind immediately is Racing Demon.
Much better going right handed, as he jumps out to the right. This was evident at Cheltenham when he ran in the Ryanair, he just kept jumping out to his right, which lost him so much ground during the race.
Lovely horse, but is much more effective going right handed.
I think there’s something in this.
Without wishing to start a ‘Kauto’ frenzy again Kauto Star is:
5/9 LH
6/6 RHI’d like to see him do it on a LH course before believing he’s back to his best.
Mister McGoldrick must have won a dozen times or so, but has never won RH.
Punjabi is 1/5 LH and 3/5 RH, may have been even better if he hadn’t fell the other day.
Jack the Giant is 2/6 LH and 6/7 RH.
However, these stats don’t take into account going, distance, class, fitness etc; but I do think there’s something to be gained from looking at horses’ preferences for clockwise or anti-clockwise.
Clive,
I still think the best way to demonstrate it is to place an object about two foot high on the floor and step over it. If you lead with your right leg, as most people will instinctively, you’ll find it easy. If you then try again leading with the other leg, most people will stumble, or at the very least look clumsy and unbalanced.
There are plenty of people with far more experience of horses than me on here, but I assume that every horse has a preferred lead leg and that it would also prefer to jump off that leg. I have also wondered if what we see on the racecourse relates back to what happens during the schooling process at home.
This was prompted by noticing that some trainers seemed to produce a preponderance of horses that preferred to go one way round – the most notable recent example being Hen Knight. With the obvious exception of Best Mate, she has had a lot of right-handed horses and you can see the influence by looking at her long term strike rates. Take out Best Mate and she’s hardly had a Cheltenham winner for years and her record at Newbury is also poor.
But put the same horses round Ascot, Kempton or Wincanton etc and they win their fair share. Whether that’s caused by the riding style of the person doing the schooling, or the physical layout of the schooling ground, I’ve no idea.
To answer the original question asked by Cormack, yes it is something I look for when watching races and then take into account in future bets, or at least in pricing races. I’d estimate that around half of all horses running over fences and hurdles are affected by it, with perhaps 10% showing a significant bias to the extent of only being able to win when going their preferred way round.
One advantage of it as a betting tool is that it’s purely subjective, as these threads have confirmed!
Quote – "I’d estimate that around half of all horses running over fences and hurdles are affected by it, with perhaps 10% showing a significant bias to the extent of only being able to win when going their preferred way round."
That sounds a pretty significant figure. Food for thought at the very least.
It’s something I always check, with the proviso that the horse is fully exposed going both ways round. Like showing a preference for a certain going, just because a horse has only run on say Good and now faces Soft for the first time doesn’t mean it won’t act on it, though the uncertainty would be factored into the assessed odds taking into account any marked sire and half/full sibling preferences.
It’s not just a preponderance of winning form one way round I consider but also the fluctuation in ‘median’ form rating and any visual evidence that a horse’s jumping is affected.
Left or right dominance is well established in humans so I see no reason why it shouldn’t be the case in horses. Dogs and cats tend to scratch themselves with the same back leg and in the case of cats use the same lead leg when leaping onto a warm lap.
"…cats use the same lead leg when leaping onto a warm lap"
Wouldn’t know about that, Drone, it’s been a long tine since I had a pussy on my lap
Interesting stuff.
Is the RH/LH bias necessarily related to jumping, though? If it were, presumably it would be more marked amongst chasers than hurdlers and would not occur on the Flat.
Do horses that jump left do better on left-handed tracks? I am not sure why this would be, as surely the majority of obstacles jumped would be jumped more-or-less straight, so whilst an inability to jump straight is going to lose a horse ground, it is not necessarily going to cost the horse more ground if jumping out the ‘wrong’ way.
Have a look at Racing Demon’s Ryanair run compared to one of his King George VI runs for example.
In his last run in the King George, he jumped through the birch in the fence on so many occasions, i.e. he jumps out right. On a right handed track, it can give you a few lengths at the jump.
In the Ryanair, he wasn’t positioned near the rail even though he was going left handed and he jumps out to the right. So, when he jumps out right on a left handed circuit, he loses a lot of ground at his fences and has to do a lot of work in order to gain those lengths back that he loses.
Is there more to it than just jumping though. Presumably the ‘leading leg’ theory would mean that certain horses on the flat where they are negotiating tight bends at speed are at a disadvantage or advantage?
Does this wholly explain why certain horses becoms course specialists? Is it that they aren’t really ‘course’ specialists and merely left/right specialists?
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