Less than one month ago, here at Thoroughbred Racing Commentary, we were thrilled to introduce the TRC Global Horse Rankings. These are a different - and we believe a fairer and more accurate - way of ranking racehorses than the traditional methods in use elsewhere.
Under the traditional ranking systems, handicappers assign ratings for every run a horse makes. Then they use the best run to establish its place in an overall classification. This has always had the potential to wildly exaggerate some runners’ positions in the hierarchy and under-appreciate where others should be ranked. The annual Longines World’s Best Racehorse Rankings, for instance, could more accurately be described as the World’s Best Racehorse Performances because they use one number per horse to infer a hierarchy - with no reference to other performances that may - or may not - support the assessment.
The architect and professional manager of the TRC Global Rankings is James Willoughby. Here is some insight into Willoughby’s thought process of the Global Rankings and how they inform the Horse Rankings:
“TRC Global Rankings starts with Racing Post Ratings (RPRs), the collateral form system of the Racing Post as the ground zero for learning the relative merits of groups of horses across the world. The RPRs achieved by every runner in every G1, G2, and G3 race run in all the major racing countries every year - there are about 1,450 of them - are a key ingredient in the formula that determines the overall points of each individual. Because a RPR of, say, 120 is designed to reflect the same merit whether the race took place in Europe, America or Japan, the TRC Global Rankings can capture the global impact of the competitors relative to each other.
“This is before we let the computer refine those assessments, approaching handicapping in the manner described above as an optimization exercise. We might award much larger differences in ratings than the distances between runners describe because it is a justifiable precept of assessing races that the order of finish is the more important variable.
“To our system, a horse is best represented by the mean and variance of all the possible ratings that make sense, given the set of results of Group/Graded races around the world. Notice we do not use information from outside these races, which would be an advantage in accuracy but would depart from our ethos as a ranking system, rather than a prediction system.”
It’s all part of racing’s growing internationalization
In order to fully appreciate the intrinsic value and credibility of the TRC Global Horse Rankings, it would be very helpful to re-visit the methodology and analytics underlying the TRC Global Rankings. Here is a comment from an article written by editor of TRC, Chris Smith, and James Willoughby on their launch in October 2016.
“As racing continues its internationalization apace, it is no longer satisfactory to compartmentalize success when horses are shipped round the world to compete against each other and global operations source talent from an increasingly disparate base.
The first time we ran the rankings, it was fascinating to see how the big names on each continent compared with one another. There is no attempt to be politically correct here either; at every step of the development, we stayed true to a robust method, so that the analysis informed us, and not the other way round.
There are many other strands to the TRC Global Rankings. It will be possible to compare the relative progress of young stallions across generations, for instance, or to spot young talent before the rest of the world has noticed.
It all adds up to what we believe is a significant development in the way racing is understood internationally.”
At the time of the launch of TRC Global Rankings in October 2016, Willoughby wrote a one-page summary that provides a brief overview of the Global Rankings and insight in how they were developed, as well as the value that they bring for anyone working in the Thoroughbred racing and breeding industry. I strongly encourage anyone reading this to click here for Willoughby’s article.
The sentences below are the opening statements from this article.
- The TRC Global Rankings are a measure of an individual’s level of achievement over a rolling 3-year period.
- They are based not on prize money the individuals' representatives have won but on the quality of the performances those runners have put up in Group and Graded races. There are about 1,450 qualifying races around the world every year.
- An individual’s position in the rankings depends entirely on how well their representatives have been running. Racing Post Ratings (RPRs) are used to help calculate the merit of every performance of every runner in each of the races.
- Individuals are positioned in the standings according to their total points (bold figure in the second column from the end).
- The points are derived from two numbers - Impact Value (IV) and time-decayed Racing Post Ratings (tRPR) - which are displayed in two columns in the center of the tables.
For serious industry participants or anyone who would like a further detailed explanation on the specifics behind development of the rankings, Willoughby provides this 20-page document. Here is a sample of the first five of the 18 topics that are discussed in this detailed and impressive document.
How the TRC Global Rankings work - technical specifications and detailed overview
1.0 Motivation
2.0 How to interpret the weekly rankings
2.1 How to interpret changes to the weekly rankings
3.0 The components that drive the rankings
3.1 How the rankings use Racing Post Ratings
TRC Global Rankings provide the sport of horseracing with a global classification of the humans involved in riding, owning and training the best racehorses on the planet. There is also a category of sires. TRC Global Rankings are different and more powerful than those for other sports because they are designed to be predictive.
Like other ranking systems, such as those for golf and tennis, they are an objective, critical assessment of past results intended to reflect in some way the established world order. However, TRC Global Rankings are equally forward-looking, and they use machine-learning techniques to understand what is important in projecting a competitor’s future success.
Fascinating insight
After the launch, Willoughby, working with the TRC editor Chris Smith, spent two years in the development of the TRC Global Horse Rankings. Beginning with the launch on August 31, Willoughby wrote three detailed and fascinating articles (see links below). The first introduced the details of the horse rankings and the second and third went back and reconstructed the top ten horses at various intervals from 2014-2018, which provides tremendous insight into the assessments. This will also give you the opportunity to make your own judgement about how the TRC Global Horse Rankings were developed.
The links:
A new way of assessing racehorses
From Treve to American Pharoah
Smith then wrote an article for horseracingplanet.com: Time for a revolution in racehorse rankings - but Enable’s still number one (for now).
Smith wrote, “Admirable though they undoubtedly are, the Longines World’s Best Racehorse Rankings - formerly the International Classifications - have never really done what it says on the tin. Indeed, as an order of merit of horses worldwide, they represent a flawed exercise.
“It would be a different matter if they were called the Longines World’s Best Racehorse Performances. That is after all, what they represent: an ordered list of horses based solely on the runs the international handicappers consider meritorious.
“However, there are many reasons why a horse can look fairly spectacular once or twice but not actually be able to show that level of ability in different circumstances. And still more why another may win by only relatively narrow margins but be able to do it time and again, no matter what fate may throw him or her.
“Which is why we have introduced the TRC Global Horse Rankings …
“We are using a database of results that goes back to 2014, meaning we know how any horse that has run in Group/Graded races since then would have fared had the TRC Global Horse Rankings been published during that time. There are many big differences with the Longines WBRR figures.”
The Cracksman rating
Smith uses Cracksman as an example:
“In 2018, the John Gosden-trained Cracksman was rated the joint world #1 (with Winx). His rating (130) was due to one performance - a wide margin win in the Champion Stakes ahead of worthy but tired opponents past their best for the year and uncomfortable on the deep ground at Ascot. He had earned the same for a remarkably similar dominant win in soft ground in the same race the year before (which meant he was classed as world #3 with Winx and Gun Runner, behind Arrogate and California Chrome).
“But those two outlying performances aside, Cracksman’s best rating was 124, achieved when winning the G1 Prix Ganay at ParisLongchamp when a well-held runner-up to Poet’s World in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot. Yet Cracksman’s world-end rating was 4lb better than Poet’s World (who also won the King George) and 3lb better than his stablemate Roaring Lion, who beat Poet’s World in the Juddmonte International at York as well as winning the Eclipse, the Irish Champion and the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes in a campaign that ended with European Horse of the Year honours.
“Cracksman was also considered to be superior to two Triple Crown winners - Justify in the U.S. and the Japanese filly Almond Eye.”
“Because of this and many other anomalies, we resolved to find another way - using the mathematics behind TRC Global Rankings. The development of the horse rankings has taken us almost two years, but we now have a realistic and robust set of rankings we are proud of. Our algorithm has the great Enable as out first number one, in contrast to most single-ratings-based lists, which have 2020 powerhouse Ghaiyyath at the top.”
Data you can’t find anywhere else
The world of Thoroughbred racing and breeding has grown and expanded into a truly international business with many facets. Since the launch in October 2016 of the TRC Global Rankings, these rankings are being utilized by both breeders and horse owners at major horse sales venues in the U.S., Ireland, England, France, Australia, Japan and the rest of the world.
Owners, trainers and wagering customers can review the performance of other owners, trainers and jockeys and check their rankings against jockey colonies they are not familiar with. In fact, if for any reason you are interested in the actual performance and detailed analysis of the top 500 jockeys, owners, trainers and/or stallions, you can get detailed performance information updates weekly with data you cannot find anywhere else.
After two years of developmental and analytical work, we are thrilled to be offering the most detailed performance information and individual rankings of the top 500 racehorses around the world.
There is a tremendous amount of information in the TRC Global Horse Rankings, as there is in the other four categories. I invite and strongly encourage you to go to the two links mentioned above where Willoughby has written a one-page synopsis and a separate detailed 20-page analysis of the value that has been developed for anyone with a serious interest or investment in the Thoroughbred racing or breeding industry.