I wish I knew someone who trained thoroughbreds. If I knew someone who trained thoroughbreds, I could probably increase his win percentage by 5 percent easily,  (with all due respect to female trainers, I will use “his” for ease of use). Now, you might ask yourself, how on earth could a racing blogger help a trainer increase the win percentage? The answer lies in where horse racing is and where it needs to be heading.

If racing were compared to traditional sports, trainers would be the head coaches. Well, I’ve noticed one peculiarity in how horse racing works differently than traditional sports and it’s not a good one; horse racing conditioning is completely void of analytics!

In every other sport, the coaching is done using equal parts analytics and gut instinct-as it should be. Bill Belichick is an ardent follower of this philosophy. He studies statistical analysis of playcalling as it relates to downs and distance then seamlessly melds that knowledge with his own intuition, and the results have been the creation of the most over-acheiving team in the history of the National Football League.

So, how can trainers learn from Belichick?

Every horse is an individual, but after 150 years or so, certain patterns have emerged. There are ideal times to bring your horse back after a layoff. There are training patterns that can be used to get your horse to peak at the right time. There is even geo-spatial (location based) data that can tell you which tracks are most likely to cause injury to your horse and which tracks will cause your horse to be stronger if he trains over them.

Imagine the type of advantage a trainer would have if he used both analytics as well as gut instinct. All of a sudden, all his horses would be running in the right spots. Fewer of his horses would be injured. He could even measure his horses feed to figure out their nutritional state.

Now, I know for a fact that trainers have a good eye and can figure out all the things I measured using a pencil and a notebook, and still get it right 70% of the time. If they incorporated analytics, they would probably get it right 95% of the time; which last I checked, is even better than 70%. Going back to football, Norv Turner- a more traditional coach called a pretty good game. I would say his calls made sense 70% of the time, but Belichick almost always called the right play, and that is why the Patriots have been more successful than the Chargers even though they have the same level of talent. You simply need every advantage you can get your hands on, and analytics seems to be one of the last remaining advantages.

Like football, racing is a game of inches. If you could use analytics to make your horse one length faster, imagine how many third and fourth place finishes would turn into wins or close second place finishes. The advantages are even greater considering that most old-school trainers hate data. They seem to think that numbers are a plague upon humanity and analytics is its evil spawn.

With many trainers in charge of 30-40 horses, mistakes in training, feeding and race selecting are bound to be made. The trainer who uses software to help him keep track of feeding schedules, and analyze training practices as well as the condition book is bound to make less mistakes than his counterparts.

I am proud to be part of an organization that understands how data-driven handicapping should be. I have used Thoroughbred Analytics to give me that slight edge when handicapping, and I am a more consistent and profitable handicapper because of it.
Do I simply pick a horse based on its TA indicator? I do no such thing; but I do combine my years of racetrack experience with the TA indicator to give me an edge over the competition. In other words, I pull a “Belichick” and combine intuition with analytics to compete at a higher level than I ever thought possible. With so many handicappers picking horses based on nothing more than hunches, the handicapper that uses data is at a huge advantage, and the handicapper that combines data and intuition is incredibly tough to beat.

Maybe a middle of the pack trainer will use this article as motivation to give his intuition a solid data-driven foundation and win the training title at his track. Maybe, a young handicapper will use data to win a handicapping tournament against a bunch of grizzled veterans, one can only hope.