Strength in numbers: De Boinville assuming mantle of top jockey in close finish

If you had asked ten random punters in the Sir Anthony McCoy era to name the jockey they would most like to be riding a horse they had backed in a tight finish of a jumps race, nine times out of ten the answer would be the 20-time champion. McCoy retired in April 2015, but if you posed this question now you would probably get ten different answers.

McCoy consistently won more close finishes than he was entitled to throughout his riding career. Evidence to support this can be found by comparing his number of winning rides by no more than half a length against his number of beaten rides who lost out by no more than half a length.

If we assume a jockey can be expected to achieve exactly the same number of narrow wins and narrow defeats, McCoy consistently performed better than expected in this area throughout his career, even in the closing chapters. His record from 2014 onwards was 45 wins versus 34 losses, and dividing wins by losses gives us a success-in-close-finishes ratio we can use to compare jockeys to each other. McCoy’s ratio in this period is 1.36 – a figure above 1 suggests a jockey is exceeding expectations.