I like looking at historical data and seeing if any trends have emerged. As you can probably tell, sometimes I overthink a race, but I’ve always believed that eight out of ten times historical data and trends will help you to better handicap a race than you could have otherwise. I like seeing anything that I enjoy being done to be done at its best. I play a ton of six-furlong dirt races, so naturally I like the Breeder’s Cup Sprint.  As much as this may surprise some, the historical trends of the BC Sprint actually are relevant to six furlong races run across the country regardless of class. Let’s take a quick look at the race and see what it can teach us about sprints in general.

In the past 15 runnings of the race, stalkers have won more than half of the runnings of this race.

This may not surprise veteran horseplayers, but the art of knowing how to rate is as important in a sprint as it is in a route. What does not show up in this data is that of the four frontrunners who won, three enjoyed some type of speed bias that day. This means that on an average day at the track, regardless of how the pace scenario looks on paper, you would be better off playing the confirmed stalker.

One thing that I love to do when playing sprints is breakdown the horses by running type and play the stalker with the highest TA Indicator, even if a frontrunner has the highest overall TA Indicator. This will all become irrelevant once we launch our pace projector, but for now you as a handicapper must do a little extra homework when handicapping sprints.

As far as post position is concerned, there isn’t a significant anti-rail bias. Most jockeys are savvy enough to know that if they draw the rail they need to gun their horse or take all the way back and so post position one isn’t great, but isn’t nearly as bad as everyone thinks it is. Surprisingly, anything further than post 11 is pretty bad due to the fact that you will get hung out wide. The best thing to do is if you see a horse that draws one of these posts, subtract four points from its TA Indicator. Do not add any points to horses who drew post positions 1 through 11 as there isn’t a huge advantage one way or another.

Breeding is a tough angle. As California Chrome has shown us, horses don’t know and don’t care who their parents are. This is why I traditionally have not been the biggest pedigree handicapper. However, there are certain sires that are worth looking into. They are the usual suspects like Speightstown and Teuflesberg. I will be getting into pedigree handicapping in next week’s post, so I don’t want to go overboard here. The main takeaway is that you should be prepared to forget a horse’s pedigree if he is showing you that he wants to outrun it.

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