How the Rankings evolved – and who were the top points scorers on the way

The evolution of the TRC Global Rankings began on January 5, 2014. Since then we have produced and archived weekly rankings internally, providing us with a rich set of data for tracing the career trajectory of the world’s best jockeys, owners, trainers and sires over the last three years.

Right off the bat, it is important to state what the TRC Global Rankings do and do not imply. The points score at any one time is both an index of past performance and a projection of future success.

The underlying principle here is that of minimising future ranking violations – a mathematical term for trying to predict winners!

The points score drives the rankings we produce each week, which determines the optimal ranking that is likely to result in the fewest instances of lower-ranked competitors defeating higher-ranked ones in races over the next week (i.e. before the next set of TRC Global Rankings are published).

This is what makes TRC Global Rankings unique. They are testable and, indeed, test themselves and continually adapt to new results using machine-learning techniques.

The motivation of TRC Global Rankings is therefore NOT an exercise in playing with numbers. And it is NOT a subjective or biased arrangement of world leaders according to our prior beliefs. The numbers have been battle-tested millions and millions of times since our research began back in 2014.

If you have ever heard people say of rankings “How can individuals in different situations across the world possibly be compared?”, we believe we know the answer. TRC Global Rankings use robust mathematics and connect jockeys, owners, trainers and sires by common opponents, so that an order of merit emerges.

The TRC Global Rankings don’t measure the aggregate of success. Group races in some countries are better than others; they are rarer than one another; some are contested by horses within the country, others by a wider diaspora. All this is taken into account.  

To mark the start of the publication of TRC Global Rankings, here is a look at the competitors in each category who have produced the highest points totals since we began the project in January 2014. This should provide users with a framework of expectation in the forthcoming weeks.

JOCKEYS

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Ryan Moore is often referred to as “the best jockey in the world” and many experienced judges concur. Let’s leave aside the word “best” for a moment because this is a highly subjective reference.

“Best” should mean that a rider makes the biggest difference to a horse at the margin, as would be defined in economics. To properly examine this conjecture requires control of the quality of Moore’s mounts in global Group races, but nobody is doing this. And TRC Global Rankings makes no implicit claim that Moore is the best in ranking him our current global #1.

Instead, we consider him the most successful currently, and indeed since our numbers began back in 2014. His partnership with trainer Aidan O’Brien, riding many horses owned by the CoolmorePartners and sired by Galileo give him a huge advantage, but the relationship is a four-way symbiosis.

Importantly, TRC Global Rankings are comparable across categories, however, and, for what it is worth, we consider Coolmore Partners are the most important link in the chain. John Magnier is one of the greatest stallion men of all time, and the racing and breeding organisation he has masterminded with others is the world leader.

But, make no mistake, Moore’s presence in the saddle is a big factor too.

Until his retirement, O’Brien’s son Joseph also enjoyed the No. 1 seat at Ballydoyle and put together a great career, which should be evaluated free of any charge of nepotism. That Joseph’s highest points score of 1072 (from October 2014) is less than Moore’s peak score indicates that he didn’t win major races – and defeat his contemporaries – with quite the same regularity of his predecessor, but he was also our #1 rider at the time.

OWNERS

As mentioned in above, Coolmore Partners are the dominant force in global horse racing, but there are times in the past when we have temporarily had Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin operation ranked #1. At present, Coolmore is out on its own at the head of affairs, thanks to a magical season in Europe by runners trained by O’Brien, ridden by Moore and sired by Galileo – all currently #1 in their respective categories.

But it should be clear that nationality is no barrier to a high points score and a #1 ranking wherever you operate. And that brings us to the concept of a competitor’s Modal Country – how we classify the centre of a competitor’s global influence.

Jockeys can ride all over the world, trainers can have satellite barns, sires can shuttle and owners can have pan-global reach; it all gets a bit confusing when trying to isolate one national identity. So, TRC Global Rankings simply use the most common (modal) country where a jockey, owner, trainer or sire has runners. This can sometimes result in an unusual classification, but so long as the definition is remembered, there should be no confusion.

TRAINERS

Some of the great trainers of a racehorse are listed in the above table, with disparate geographical locations, underlining the absence of any bias in TRC Global Rankings.

Once again, this is not the way we have drawn it up, for the algorithm is in control and seeks to identify the most likely winners of global Group and Graded races, not to maximise its international popularity.

John Moore is a very worthy inclusion because, for our money, the Hong Kong trainer is a superb operator. His presence shows off the fact that TRC Global Rankings aren’t just an aggregation of wins because Group races are not all equally common.

Moore has fewer top-level prizes to aim at than if he were training in the U.S., but the mathematics recognise his influence in the sport due to the connections with horses who ship to Hong Kong and their connections with other horses across the planet.

The same techniques are used in many other fields of machine learning nowadays, such as the optimisation of search engines.  

SIRES    

Take no notice that Dubawi is above Galileo in this table; we are not saying he is a “better” sire and the reach of our rankings is only a few years when the two sires have been at different stages of their careers. Galileo is an absolute phenomenon and is out on his own in the CURRENT standings.

Unlike our other three categories, there are global assessments of stallions using metrics like stakes-winners-to-foals or black-type percentage or whatever, and many of these are extremely worthy. They are simply focused on a different objective than TRC Global Rankings.

Yes, we want to reflect the world order among stallions at any given time, but our principle aim is to project who is going to sire the big winners next week. So, TRC World Rankings for sires emphasise the recency of a stallion’s achievements, as well as its efficiency, because our past research shows that the average rating of a sire’s offspring (captured by our metric tRPR in the main rankings tables) is a leading indicator of Group or Graded-race success.

So, we will have sires like Lope De Vega, Uncle Mo and the German Adlerflug higher than you might find them in conventional assessments by the aggregate because they are all good now and have numbers which suggest they are a force to be reckoned with.

Uncle Mo, incidentally, is the highest second-season sire in the rankings.

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