I’ve pondered about this a few times, not that we can really do owt about it.
Coming from the idea/question that are lower classes more prone to being bent? Previously I’ve looked at it by comparing by class the strike for the OR top rated, I found that group 1 & 2 races could perhaps be said to be ran more ‘true’ than others as they had a higher strike. Or maybe they're just rated more accurately at the top end?
But this time I’ve split it by class and hcapstks, this has shown something very interesting re G3 handicaps, I wonder why the top OR rated has such a low strike rate in those races?
I’ve looked at races over about the last 20 years but just UK only over because of the way IRE don’t always give a race an official class and you have to estimate it.
All races as baseline for comparison.
Also some trainers have particularly high and low strike rates when their horses are top OR in the race. Is there some reason why some trainer’s horses do badly even though they’re top rated?
Here’s the top 20 and bottom 20 for trainers who’ve had at least a hundred runners where that have been top rated OR in a race. Some are no longer active but the data covers about 20 years hence they’re in the list.
top 20
bottom 20
You get the same sort range with jockeys as well, I’m not pretending to shine any great light but felt like a waffle.