Will Duff Gordon, CEO of Total Performance Data, looks at the stride data of Mustashry ahead of the Shadwell Joel Stakes at Newmarket on Friday.
With crisp and clear weather forecast, this week offers a fine chance to attend the Cambridgeshire meeting at Newmarket and witness the mighty thoroughbred in full flight on the Rowley Mile.
Here at Total Performance Data one of the races we’re most looking forward to is the Group 2 Shadwell Joel Stakes on Friday and a horse of interest is the Sir Michael Stoute-trained MUSTASHRY.
He heads the betting as the market begins to form and he absolutely deserves his favourite’s tag judging by the data collected from a time and stride perspective.
He won the Group 2 Park Stakes at Doncaster last time out but he steps back up in trip by a furlong on Friday to the Joel Stakes distance of one mile.
The pace of the Park Stakes was very slow until the speed quickened around two-and-a-half furlongs from the finish whereby Mustashry clocked the penultimate two furlongs in a rapid 22.3 seconds.
In the below graphs you can see Mustashry's average stride length and cadence compared to his contemporaries over the same distance...
For a horse who has won stakes races over longer distances this season (e.g a 10f Listed at Sandown in July) a sprint for home might have left him exposed to faster horses or seven-furlong specialists like D’Bai, who he beat by a neck.
With that under consideration, it’s fair to conclude that he’s value for more than that winning margin and that he is clearly a talented horse who has plenty of acceleration that can be deployed over 7f to 10f.
Even though he was well beaten in this race last year, Newmarket’s mile looks set to be ideal based on his stride data from that Doncaster run. He has a very long stride (second only to Gronkowski in our database of smart mile winners, see above graphics) and this stands him in good stead for the rising finish when his long, raking, action will help him eat up the ground in highly efficient style.
When it comes to his cadence per second, the Doncaster race shows that he strides very quickly when you consider the length of each one. He has the ideal gait, in other words, to win this race and, if it becomes tactical, that Park Stakes win last time suggests he has the pace, too.
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