King of Stats: Barnet to have fun of the fair in Ayr Gold Cup

For racing fans, events in Scotland this week may not refer to the ongoing referendum, but to the three day meeting on the West Coast, and more specifically the Ayr Gold Cup.

Now with 27 runners set to bomb down the 6f track, finding the winner could pose a tricky task.

We’ve taken the stats and recent patterns apart and believe we have uncovered a very nicely priced winner of the race, for which Ladbrokes are now Non Runner No Bet.

As with all these King of Stats articles, the obvious place to begin would be the trends that have been prominent in each of the last ten running.

In the last decade:

– All 10 winners had shown their aptitude in big fields in competitive races, with every one previously tasting glory in a Class 3 race as well as coming out on top over at least 13 competitors

– Every one had run at least four times that season, perhaps indicating the necessity to be fully wound up and champing at the bit.

Normally applying these trends would help us narrow the field down a bit, but here is still leaves us with 19 of the field still in our calculations.

We clearly have to look deeper to narrow down the field further.

While plenty of runs this season look important, winning is not so. With handicap marks guarded like treasure, only two of the last 10 had won more than one handicap in that current season, with none in the last eight years.

Using those criteria we can eliminate improvers Highland Acclaim, Fast Shot, Go Far and recent York winner Blaine.

Now the final pattern we are going to use may seem a bit tenuous, but the stats are there and for the purpose of this article, we simply cannot discard them.

Eight of the last 10 winners had their previous runs at either Ripon, Haydock, Goodwood or Doncaster, which is strange with the difference in the characteristics in those four tracks.

Nevertheless applying that to the sample we have left leaves us with two contenders.

York Glory (25/1) last tasted victory in the Wokingham Stakes  at Royal Ascot in 2013, but unfortunately has done nothing since. His runs this season have seen him beat just 11 of his total 99 opponents home, in a desperate campaign to date.

Despite the fact he is trained by Kevin Ryan who has won this race three times in the last decade, we have to look him over due to poor form.

But if Ryan’s record in this race is good, David ‘Dandy’ Nicholls is the master.

A winner of the consolation race for the Stewards Cup, BARNET FAIR (20/1) chases a seventh win since 2000 in this contest for the trainer. The five-year-old has found 5f a bit sharp recently, so will relish the step back up to a strongly run 6f, and with man of the moment Cam Hardie in the saddle, get’s our vote to land the spoils.

All odds and markets correct as of the date of publishing

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