Data Analysis for the “2015 Tenno Sho (Spring) (G1)”

A time-honored race about to blossom on the fresh green of Yodo

The Tenno Sho (Spring), held at Kyoto Racecourse, is a marathon that starts on the far straight, then covers one-and-a-half circuits of the outer turf course before arriving at the finish. Of the last 10 years, 2008 was the only one when the top three places were occupied by horses ranked among the top 5 favorites. In 2005, those places were taken by the 13th, 14th and 4th favorites, in that order, prompting a massive Trifecta payout of 1,939,420 yen. So how will the race pan out this year? Let’s check some data from results over the last 10 years.

Watch for the dark horse

On checking aggregate performances by favoritism over the last 10 years, a notable characteristic is that horses backed as “11th-14th favorite” have produced 3 winners and two runners-up. By contrast, the only “1st favorite” to win was Deep Impact in 2006. Even in the performance by win odds, Deep Impact was the only horse to win with “3.9 or lower”, and those with “4.0-6.9” posting better performances. [Table 1][Table 2]

Specific warmup races produce more success

Turning next to performances by the previous race over the last 10 years, three important warmup races – “Nikkei Sho”, “Hanshin Daishoten” and “Sankei Osaka Hai” – have produced 24 of the 30 top 3 finishers. And although two top 2 finishers have come from the “Kyoto Kinen” and the “Osaka-Hamburg Cup”, respectively, the three aforementioned races could basically be seen as the fast track to success here. If we then check the performance of horses that took part in the “Nikkei Sho”, “Hanshin Daishoten” and “Sankei Osaka Hai” in terms of their finish in that race, a “1st” there unsurprisingly leads to a good record of success here. [Table 3][Table 4]

Check favoritism in G1 races last autumn

In the Tenno Sho (Spring), horses “backed as 4th-7th favorite in a JRA G1 race in the second half of the previous year” have finished in the top 2 in each of the last 10 years except 2008. So this year, too, it should be worth checking for horses that enjoyed a degree of favoritism in last autumn’s JRA G1 races. [Table 5]

Look at last autumn's racing record

In the Tenno Sho (Spring), horses that “contested turf graded races over distances of 2,000m or less in the previous autumn” have finished in the top 2 in each of the last 10 years except 2010. Although this is the longest G1 race in the JRA calendar, horses with experience of running in middle-distance races seem to do well here. It might be an idea to look for runners with this kind of race record this year as well. [Table 6]

Seek out the winners!
Check the finish and win favoritism in the last-but-one race

A statistic shared by all of the last 4 winners is that their “finish in the last-but-one race was 1 or 2 places lower than their favoritism”. It seems highly interesting that this trend applies to both Beat Black, 14th favorite and winner in 2012, and Fenomeno, back-to-back winner with high favoritism in the last two years. [Table 7]

(Data analysis by Yasunori Asano)