Innovation evidently the key when it comes to putting on competitive Flat racing

Most people would surely agree that competitive races are the key to a great day’s racing. But is competitiveness measured adequately?

Field sizes are the most commonly discussed metric for assessing the competitiveness of a card, but these don’t necessarily tell the full story. There is nothing more disappointing than small fields with short-priced favourites, yet a small field in which all the runners have a similar chance is preferable to a 16-runner event in which one horse is long odds-on.

I have devised a method that involves dividing the betting percentage of the favourite in each race by the total betting percentages for all the runners. The resulting figure is then given a value between one and ten: on my scale, if the favourite accounts for less than 20 per cent of the market, the race is given a ten, whereas anything over 52 per cent is given a one. Assuming an overround of two per cent per runner, a meeting with six races of ten runners and a 2-1 favourite in each would get a competitiveness rating of eight, while if each favourite was even-money it would drop to a rating of four.