Rowley Fact File: 2018 Epsom Derby

It has often been said that “there is only one Derby: all the rest are imitations”.

If that is true, and if imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then the Derby is more flattered than a runaway leader setting soft fractions. For the original has been joined over the years by Derbys in Australia, Jersey, Kentucky, India, Mauritius and countless places in between.

You can borrow the name, but no-one has yet attempted to reconstruct The Derby in its purest form. A mile and a half, plus a few yards, of twists and turns, ups and downs, and paths and cambers: there is nothing quite like it in the rest of the world of horseracing.

Whether or not it is “the supreme test of a thoroughbred”, as has often been said also, is open to debate. But that it is a test is not in doubt.

To start with, the opening five furlongs of The Derby course is the stiffest in British (and possibly in world) racing, and that includes the notorious closing stages of Towcester’s jumps track.

The latter rises 28 metres in the last 5f (Google Earth measures in metres while British racing sticks with furlongs, yards and cubits), while the former rises by 37 over the same distance. The latter is a rise of over 120 feet in old money from The Derby start to the top of the course before halfway.

What goes up must come down, if only in part where Epsom is concerned. After levelling for a short while, The Derby course drops 21 metres from 5f out to 1f out before flattening out again.

The steepest decline is from 4f out to 3f out, which drops by 8 metres. Here, it is surpassed by sections at Brighton, Chepstow and Hamilton, as well as by the opening furlong of its own sprint course, but only just.

Such large swings in the course’s topography make for large swings in speed during the race, as can be seen with the manual sectionals for Golden Horn, a superior winner who ran the third-fastest time ever in the race in 2015.

That is roughly 10 mph in difference between the speed at the slowest point of the race (if you ignore initial acceleration from a standing start) and the fastest – which was in the penultimate furlong in Golden Horn’s year – even when a horse is running pretty fast in relative terms throughout.

This alone requires a versatility which is seldom called upon anywhere else.

One thing that this year’s Derby runners will not need to contend with is a big field. Just 14 stood their ground at the five-day stage, which is fractionally below the average this century. There were 20 runners in 2003 and 18 apiece in 2006 and 2017.

Nonetheless, it can certainly be argued that there will still be some sort of a draw bias. The following are the average % of rivals beaten for 21^st Century Derbys with 12 to 14 runners – of which there have been nine – for the stall in question and the stall on either side (the idea being that a horse’s stall is a discrete entity but the effect of the draw should not be).  

What happens in those opening stages – where a right-handed bend starts after less than a furlong – helps to dictate what unfolds thereafter. A low stall has been a disadvantage and a highish stall has been the opposite.

There are, then, quite a few hoops for a horse and jockey to jump through, even before stamina, speed and ability really come into play in the closing stages.

Little wonder, perhaps, that very short-priced horses are something of a rarity in the race. The average price of a favourite in racing’s blue riband this century has been a fraction over 2/1, and only one horse – Camelot in 2012 – has gone off at odds on.   

Camelot duly won for trainer Aidan O’Brien, and he will be hoping that history repeats itself with Saxon Warrior just after 4:30 on Saturday afternoon.

Whatever the outcome, it is long odds on that the latest chapter in the legendary race’s long history will be an exciting, eventful and testing one.

View the 2018 Epsom Derby field