Do 2 year old foaling dates matter at this stage in the season?
By colin on Saturday, June 9th, 2012We wrote about foaling dates in an April post – here – on the basis that in the earlier part of the season, any edge in age – and therefore physical maturity – can have a significant impact on the outcome of races. Clearly as a horse gets older, any difference of a few months in foaling date between it and its peers will be less and less significant.
This part of the season, in the run up to Royal Ascot, is interesting and perhaps represents a cutover in the importance of the early difference in age. Form starts to mean more than foaling dates, though it’s true that Ascot 2 year old winners all tend to be quite forward, by definition.
Using Smartform we can see just how much impact foaling dates do have, and when these may become less significant, by using the historic data and writing queries to assess all previous 2 year old races.
We can also apply a query to the daily declarations to rank upcoming races in this way. Back in April we produced a query for one race – today, here’s a query extended to produce a list of all races together with contenders (for today’s racing), all ranked by foaling dates – earliest to latest – for each contender:
>select scheduled_time, course, trainer_name, jockey_name, name, foaling_date, forecast_price from daily_races join daily_runners using (race_id) where age_range=”2YO only” and meeting_date=CURDATE() order by scheduled_time, course, foaling_date;
At a forecast 14/1 price, Rock Up, ridden by Frankie Dettori and trained by David Elsworth in the 1.45 at Newmarket, stands out as a possibly overpriced January foal, assuming there is still an edge at this stage in the season.