Who runs the racing world? It’s a year for the fillies and mares

Cover image courtesy of The Image Is Everything

Pride Of Jenni’s (Pride Of Dubai) Queen Elizabeth S. rout on Saturday continued a dominant trend for fillies and mares, who are upstaging their male rivals in feature races far more than their representation says they should.

Of 17 Group 1 weight-for-age and Handicap Group 1 races run so far in 2024, mares have won seven of them, despite having a fraction of that percentage competing.

Imperatriz (I Am Invincible) accounts for two of them, while Lady Laguna (Overshare), Via Sistina (Ire) (Fastnet Rock), Zapateo (Brazen Beau), Chain Of Lightning (Fighting Sun) and Pride Of Jenni have won one each. Jenni also took care of the boys in The All Star Mile.

Gallery: Horse of the Year contenders for the 2023-24 season

Additionally, fillies have won each of the three Group 1 2-year-old races run so far this season via Hayasugi (Royal Meeting {Ire}), Lady Of Camelot (Written Tycoon) and Manaal (Tassort).

When you add on the late Victorian spring carnival feats of Atishu (NZ) (Savabeel) and Magic Time (Hellbent) adding to Imperatriz and Pride Of Jenni's tallies, the girls have been well and truly bashing up on the boys over the past six months.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon and many theories have been put forward as to why modern female racehorses achieve considerably more success than they did a few decades earlier, but statistically, it’s an interesting phenomenon.

Horse of the Year dominance

If either Pride Of Jenni or Imperatriz are named Horse of the Year, it will make it 16 of the last 25 for mares.

Let’s Elope (NZ) (Nassipour {USA}) (1991-92) was the only female to win Australian Racehorse of the Year between 1990 and 2000.

Since then the girls have totally dominated.

Sunline (NZ) (Desert Sun {GB}) kicked it off with her treble to start the century, then Makybe Diva (GB) (Desert King {Ire}) won a couple. The other multiple winners of the award this century are also mares – Black Caviar (Bel Esprit) won it three times, before Winx’s (Street Cry {Ire}) four-peat from 2016 to 2019.

Miss Andretti (Ihtiram {Ire}), Typhoon Tracy (Red Ransom {USA}) and Verry Elleegant (NZ) (Zed {NZ}) are the other females to win since 2000.

While it is true those four multiple winners might have skewed Horse of the Year results in favour of the girls, it also highlights how the four most notable thoroughbreds to race in Australia of the past two decades were all mares.

Some will argue mares have an advantage because the best colts are shipped off to stud early and of course changes to permitted medications on geldings have also had an affect.

But in a sport where the girls still enjoy an allowance in the weights over the boys, their results tend to make a mockery of that.

Punching above their weight

If we extrapolate just the last five years, the numbers show how both fillies and mares out-perform their male counterparts in Australian Group 1 races on a runner-for-runner basis.

Geldings win the most Group 1 races, but they have by far the most runners. Conversely, fillies and mares have a number of Group 1 races run within Australia each season that are restricted to filles and mares only, so a true study needs to remove those races.

In total, 13 Australian Group 1 races are restricted to fillies or fillies & mares only, each season.

Once we remove those, we get amore complete picture of how the fairer sex goes against the boys.

The below table illustrates that their strike rate in Group 1 races clearly outpoints the males.

Both fillies and mares have a strike rate of around 10 per cent in those 61 remaining Group 1 races, eligible for both sexes.

Whereas all males competing in those races strike at just a tick over 7 per cent.

That’s a telling statistic of the superiority they’ve held over the five years we’ve examined here.

Table: Australian Group 1 winners by sex over last 5 yrs

Note, in 2019-20 the number of Group 1 races was reduced due to Covid-19. In 2020-21 and 2022-23, 75 winners owes to one dead-heat within each season. For the 2023-24 season, there are still 14 Group 1s to be run.

Under-represented, over-achieving

The next table compares the percentage of runners for each category, versus the percentage of Group 1s each of them have won.

Again, the fillies and mares shoot above par and the boys, as a result, have negative outcomes.

Fillies win almost 6.5 per cent of these Group 1 races with just 4.86 per cent of the runners.

The over-performance of mares is even more exaggerated, winning 20 per cent of Group 1 races with only a little more than 15 per cent participation.

The performance of geldings mirrors the opposite way – almost 50 per cent of runners, but only supplying 45 per cent of the winners.

Table: Australian Group 1 winners by sex over last 5 yrs, excluding sex-restricted Group 1s

2023-24 – an exaggerated season

As we highlighted from the outset, 2023-24 has been a bumper one for fillies and mares, but it’s even more striking when we examine it on a per runner basis.

Mares have truly been in a league of their own this season.

They account for less than 17 per cent of the runners in the 51 eligible races, yet have collectively won almost 30 per cent of them.

Table: Representation per gender category of Australian Group 1 winners over the last 5 seasons

Fillies have also over-achieved, winning almost 6 per cent from a representation of only 3 per cent.

That leaves the colts, geldings and stallions (or ‘horses’ as the racebook prefers to label them) floundering so far this term.

It will be interesting to monitor if the trend continues over the remaining 10 Group 1 races open to both sexes over the next two months.

Table: Representation per gender category of Australian Group 1 winners to date, in 2023-24