Southern stables are the dominant force in big handicaps

A glance at the British Flat trainers’ championship before racing on Thursday portrayed a south-north divide. If we say Newmarket is in the south, and all locations north of the Suffolk town are in the north, then 15 of the 20 trainers with the biggest total earnings are based in the south.

This skew underlines how more of the most valuable contests, namely Group races, are won by horses from southern stables, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone given that the region incorporates the powerful training hubs of Newmarket and Lambourn.

However, the dominance of southern-based trainers is not confined to the highest tiers. A detectable trend in more valuable handicaps, with the exception of sprints, is disproportionate success for the population of horses trained in the south compared with the northern population of runners in these races.