Pythia Sports leading the data drive for new breeze-up sale purchases

When it comes to buying prospective star performers from the breeze-up sales in the next few weeks, the services of Pythia Sports could become another useful part of the process. 

A leading data science company with products serving the gambling sector, Pythia Sports entered the realm of bloodstock in 2023 using artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse historical breeze-up sales data to enhance the accuracy of performance predictions.

With the breeze for Tattersalls' Craven sale set to take place tomorrow, ahead of the two-day sale which gets underway on Tuesday, Pythia Sports uses data to assist potential buyers to unearth successful racehorses.

Stephen Davison, head of commercial operations at the London-based firm, explained: "One of the directors of Pythia Sports got a Hong Kong Jockey Club membership in 2023 and was given a griffin permit, so we looked at all the different ways he could get an unraced horse.

"He could have gone down the traditional route of getting a bloodstock agent to buy him a yearling,  but we thought the way to get the most data points to buy an unraced horse was at the breeze-ups. First of all you get to see it run, albeit over two and a half furlongs, see how fast it goes and have a look at its strides. It gives us more data to look at than buying a yearling, so that's why we started at the breeze-ups.

"That was in 2023 and we put in all the work, we had the data to look at our results and see what happened when the horses started to run. We thought, 'right, what should we do in 2024?' and that's when we started to look at it from a wider angle. We started speaking to various trainers, agents and owners to see if it would work for them."

Pythia Sports uses a proprietary model which incorporates over 100 key factors, evaluating every horse at the breeze-ups. These factors generate a comprehensive combined rating based on time, stride and biomechanics.

Stephen Davison: head of of commercial operations at Pythia Sports

Davison said: "The technology itself looks at three different sections of the breeze: the time, how fast the horse goes and we also use one of our models to look at the stride profile; this tracks each stride as the horse gallops combining it with sectional times. That allows us to see how the stride profile changes as the horse accelerates and when it reaches top speed.

"We have biomechanics as well, that looks at the horse's walk and takes measurements of a horse's conformation and its gait. That works in conjunction with historic racing performances to learn what the most defining physical features are in an elite horse. We don't just have data from that breeze-up, we have data from others sales.

"For example we can go back ten years to look up breeze-up data to say, 'this horse did this breeze, this stride and these biomechanics' and then the machine learning model can start picking up stuff we've missed or things we've maybe underestimated or overestimated."

The system has come up with a number of winners, including Master Of My Universe who runs in Hong Kong for John Size and has achieved over HKD$2.5m (£246,377 / €283,974) in prize-money.

"So far there have been 16 horses in total we've advised on from the sales, they've had 16 wins at a strike-rate of about 20 per cent. Since we're doing the work for the entire sale we can see how the horses we've rated highly have gone on to perform," Davison added.

All told, the reaction to Pythia Sports' entry into the breeze-up world seems to have been positive. The use of data-driven evidence looks here to stay in whatever sport or industry and even the traditional world of bloodstock could be keeping up with the times.

Davison said: "I think there's definitely starting to be a lot more openness to people using data. In other sports, even other industries, people are using some form of data or technology to try and improve things. We spoke to a lot of trainers and agents, they're very interested and we're hoping this can run as a service alongside those guys and give them a hand."

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