Fast ground draw bias and 'curse of stall nine' can safely be downplayed in Arc

Scott Burton crunches some stalls numbers in advance of Sunday's Qatar Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, but you might want to draw your own conclusions

It is a situation that every punter and parieur has been faced with at one stage or another: the stats say a low draw in the Arc is much more often than not a major advantage and you find yourself obliged to defend your long-term fancy against the decision of the racing gods to hand them stall 17 of 17.

And in many -not most - years you would be having a costly argument with yourself.

So here are the facts, such as they can be called given the vagaries of ground and field size: 18 of the last 23 Arc winners at Longchamp have broken from between stalls one and seven.

The local lore reflects this as well, with horsemen adamant that on fast ground and with the rail at 'zero' - that is its innermost limit, as it always is on Arc day - then those who can get a prominent sit from a low draw do not come back to those drawn wide and forced to tuck in.

But when the ground gets deeper in the Bois de Boulogne, the fidelity of such thinking gets decidedly less certain.

Since 1996, there have been seven Longchamp Arcs where the ground was soft, very soft, holding or heavy.

* In 2003 stall 11 was vacant

From this admittedly much smaller sample size we have four horses winning from stall eight or higher. Still, that is four out of the five winners in the 23 Longchamp Arcs in our sample.

One obscure historical fact did surface during Thursday morning's televised draw as Francois Boulard of France Galop revealed shortly after Enable's name was drawn that stall nine has been successful just once in the last 55 years.

There is absolutely no statistical reason for this that I can discover, though those of a superstitious nature will not be pleased to hear it.

The bad news for coincidence backers is that the sole winner from the nine draw was sent off at 37-1. The good news is that she was none other than Urban Sea.

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