Sandown today represents one of the more unusual meetings on the racing calendar, with its combination of top class jump racing mixed with top class flat racing. As such, we see Flat training giants of the like of Henry Cecil rubbing shoulders with their jumps equivalents, such as Paul Nicholls.

Using Smartform we can identify exactly which trainers have runners at Sandown and produce various statistics off the back of this. This sort of query is often a useful prerequisite to working out the relative strike rate of each trainer with runners, for example.

Here, however, we will get the trainer names and show a simple count of the number of runners for each by using the group function.  We’re interested in a count from those trainers fielding the largest team to those trainers fielding only one runner.

This can be done as follows:
mysql> select count(trainer_id) AS ‘#Runners’, trainer_name AS “Trainer” from daily_runners join daily_races using (race_id) where meeting_date=CURDATE() and course=”Sandown” group by trainer_name order by count(trainer_id) DESC;

63 rows in set (0.09 sec)

So no surprise that the top stables in both flat and jumps are best represented today, and some testament to what a classy day’s racing Whitbread day is (though now appears to be bet365 day?).

As for the trainers mentioned, on the Flat Henry Cecil weighs in with an impressive 14 day strike rate (according to Smartform calculations) of 24%, whilst John Gosden and Saeed Bin Suroor are languishing on 8% and 7% respectively.

Over the jumps, Paul Nicholls’ strike rate is 18% in the last 14 days and Nicky Henderson’s is an impressive 26% from 38 runners.