True Story: Let's settle the issue

Coming soon to a screen near you…

One momentous prize. Two momentous rivals. A story of give and take: no quarter given, extreme measures taken. A story of a power struggle; one team’s had all the power, the other’s had a struggle. And it’s all about him. The Fall Guy. The Fallen Guy. The Fallon Guy. He used to work for one side, now he’s on the other. He’s got a score to settle, he’s got the insider knowledge of the opposition, and he’s got a new crack partner. The heat is on. The race is on.*

*These events are based on a True Story.

It’s been a long time since either Saeed bin Suroor or Kieren Fallon has approached the Derby with open expectation rather than hope ‘n desperation, but True Story has put them both on the front row of the grid. In the final lap of qualifying, they have an opportunity to ‘take pole’ from Australia.

In recent times, individually, Godolphin and Fallon haven’t so much flirted with controversy as got her number, taken her out and embarked on a short-term relationship, but True Story is giving them a new lease of life and another chance, overdue for one and surprising for the other, Fallon being in the blue coming out of the blue.

Aidan O’Brien, one-time employer of Fallon and long-time annoyer of Godolphin, and trainer of pole-positioned Australia, had this to say, only this week at the Ballydoyle media day, about the prize on which all have their eyes: ‘The Derby is the hardest race of all for the thoroughbred. It’s the ultimate test of a racehorse. They’ve got to have the speed, the stamina, and the right mind. That’s what the breed is all about.’

The ‘right mind’ is the interesting bit. You only have to go back to last year’s Derby to see what the not-right mind can result in, when the Godolphin-owned Dawn Approach blew his brains and his chance by completely refusing to settle. The free-going New Approach was perhaps the exception that proves the rule, but his son, Dawn Approach, learnt the lesson the hard way: Relax – don’t do it, and your race is run.

Relaxing is a potential issue for True Story. Look back at his last two wins, in the first couple of furlongs, and you’ll see a horse on the very brink of pulling hard. Everybody has been so seduced – justifiably so – with what True Story has been doing at the end of his races, that we might be ignoring the muffled alarm bells from the start of them. The issue of a keen horse puts more emphasis on the rider, and a change of rider puts more emphasis on the issue. In his new position, Kieren Fallon will be taking over from Silvestre de Sousa aboard True Story.

Thanks to the Timeform digital database, and the mode of input by our race-readers, we now not only log every time a horse races freely but also have the means to analyse the data for wider studies, such as which jockeys might be better than others at settling horses. With the usual caveats of qualifying instances and non-contextualised research, here are the raw results, encompassing the start of the 2013 season to the present day, incorporating all jockeys who’ve had 300+ rides in Britain in that time.

These aren’t the factoids you’re looking for. Plan A, the original outline, banked on using the crunched numbers (as provided by Timeform’s Statistical Stig, the boy Williamson) to strengthen my misguided impressions that True Story’s new jockey, Fallon, though many things, including enforcer, invigorator, and reinvigorated, wasn’t a settler. Settling races, yes, but settling horses, not so much, certainly compared to the adroit Brazilian he’s replacing.

But that’s the whole point of data dissection – to take the suppose out of supposition – and the highest-value stats tend to be the unpredicted ones. It’s a measure of their all-round artistry that soothe Hughes and relaxer Ryan are low down the pullers index, the former 7.8% and the latter 7.4%, from over 1000 rides each, and the proof is indeed in the pudding for switch-off Spencer (6.1%), while the semi-surprise packages worth noting are Graham Gibbons (4.5%) and Richard Kingscote (3.8%), who get a golden hand each as joint-winners of the ‘soft hands’ award.

Fallon may not be one of the best exponents, but he’s not amongst the worst offenders, either, and True Story isn’t any more liable to go headlong into headstrong for the change in rider, not according to the mitt-fist list, anyway. Case closed? Issue solved? No, of course not. For one thing, to assume that an energy-wasting horse is a rider-only matter is like thinking that the performance of an F1 car in completely dependent on the driver.

There are influences of nature and nurture. Some horses are just innately exuberant and that’s that, and then there’s the way they’re programmed, the way they’re conditioned, the way they’re trained. And look at the unsettling top of the jockeys table – two of the three riders with the poorest record are the retained pair who’ve ridden the vast majority of the Godolphin horses. Maybe it’s a Godolphin thing, maybe it’s a trainer thing; maybe it’s a Godolphin trainer thing.

We ran the same audit, this time for trainers rather than jockeys, up to date from the beginning of 2012, again with a minimum number of 300 runners, also again with the admonition of unrefined data:

The evidence is mounting that it is indeed a Godolphin thing. Exactly the same as the Godolphin jockeys, the Godolphin trainers are two of the three most frequent culprits when it comes to headstrong horses, and look at who also sneaks into the top ten, the very prodigal Godolphin son.

We’re in a realm that goes well beyond coincidence, but whether or not it impacts on True Story, it brings us to the wider, bigger point at the heart of the matter of True Story vs Australia, of Godolphin vs Ballydoyle, of O’Brien vs bin Suroor, in turn helping to explain their discrepancy in Derby odds when there’s only 1 lb between them on Timeform ratings, subject to change in the Dante. O’Brien has a proven track record of preparing horses to peak at Epsom, whereas bin Suroor –and Godolphin generally – hasn’t.

The surface story of True Story is his new jockey, who incidentally has won the Derby three times, but the rider may be irrelevant, because the true story of True Story is the team and trainer he represents and their historical Derby defects relative to others, and relative to one in particular.

But do keep in mind that, be it York or Epsom, the first furlongs are every bit as critical as the last one regarding True Story, whose nature/nurture means he’s on the edge, at that subtle-yet-significant tipping point on the travelling spectrum between going strongly and going freely. It’s not always the case that the best things in life are free.    

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