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Why Harbinger earned a Timeform rating of 140 and is one of Stoute's best horses
Timeform Flat editor David Johnson explains why Harbinger was awarded a Timeform rating of 140 and is one of Sir Michael Stoute's highest-rated horses.
In Timeform’s opinion, Harbinger's 11-length win in the 2010 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes marked him down as an outstanding colt, a performance among the best that Timeform has rated in its long history. Timeform fully recognises the historical significance placed on its ratings within the industry, and a rating of 140 certainly wasn't arrived at lightly and without due diligence.
Talk of 'yardsticks' when discussing handicap ratings was prevalent in the media at that time, and is still an issue today, albeit to a lesser extent, but assigning a horse as having run its race and basing the entire assessment of the race on that premise isn't the way Timeform handicaps races. References like 'Youmzain is just about as solid a yardstick as can be found' is surely bogus, as even that horse's record in just the King George - beaten four lengths by Dylan Thomas in 2007, nine and a half lengths by Duke of Marmalade in 2008 and fourteen and a quarter lengths by Harbinger - will testify.
Rather than try to guess which of Harbinger's rivals 'ran their race' or is 'the one to rate the race around', the first thing that is done is to produce a 'standard' for the race that objectively takes into account the difference at the weights of the runners and makes an adjustment for the likely strength of the form through the field size. The standard for the 2010 King George compared to the previous five runnings of the race suggests rating the winner in a range of 138/135/138/140/138 (most recent race first).
However, it could be argued that the 2010 King George was rather different in make up to those in the race's more recent history as it was the first year since Alamshar won in 2003 that there had been a meaningful representation from the classic crop. A standard compared to the years of 2004 to 2000 would read 138/140/140/139/143. Either way, whether looking at the race through a five-year or ten-year perspective, a rating of 140 was clearly within the acceptable range solely from historical standards.
Race standards are an excellent guide to rating horses with a limited amount of form to go on, but races like the King George are contested by horses we know quite a bit about, and we can use their previous form to calculate a different standard for the race. Using this methodology to rate the King George would suggest a rating of 142 for Harbinger.
The third key aspect we have for helping us to compile as accurate a rating as possible for any individual race is the overall race time. Form is probably a more key component than time in the ratings that are printed in our racecards, but the time of a race is still very important in giving support to how solid a form rating is. You would have more confidence in a horse who finished fifth in a Lingfield maiden with a form rating of 72 and timefigure of 70 reproducing that form rating than a horse with a similar form rating but a timefigure of just 27. The timefigure for Harbinger returned at 'only' 135, but that is still one of the best over the last 30 years. It is because the timefigure was unable to fully back up the form rating that a form rating of 140 was assigned, rather than 142.
Using the overall race time in isolation, though, sometimes has its flaws, and a lack of publicly available sectional times was even more of an issue in 2010 than it is today. Even back then, and before in fact, Timeform was producing its own for internal purposes under the guidance of Simon Rowlands. An analysis of the time recorded for the last three furlongs of each contender compared to the overall race time they recorded suggests that Harbinger was the only runner in the King George to run evenly.
Expressing the horses' finishing speeds as a percentage of their average overall speeds comes up with figures of: Harbinger 99.7%; Cape Blanco 95.5%; Youmzain 95.4%; Daryakana 95.4%; Workforce 93.7%; and Confront 91.4%, where a figure of around 100% would be optimum. This seems to confirm that the overall margin of victory was exaggerated somewhat by the beaten rivals running an uneven pace. In other words, Harbinger was the only horse capable of sustaining his effort.
Poundage allowances for margins beaten need to be sensitive to the conditions under which they occur, and the pounds-per-length that were used in the King George - on good to firm ground and with the horses running at fast speeds - was greater than would usually be the case at a mile and a half. However, the evidence of the sectionals is that the beaten horses need to be rated a minimum of 5 lb better than the result. In practice, this is why Harbinger's master rating is 140, having recorded a performance figure of 140 in the race, Cape Blanco had a master rating after of 125 after running to 120 and the rest were further below form than simply allowed for by their closing sectionals (Youmzain 123/113 and Daryakana 119/110).
Running a handicap involves updating past performances as further information becomes available, so it was with regret and a degree of frustration that this proved to be Harbinger’s final outing after he suffered a leg injury when being prepared for the Juddmonte International.
What he might have achieved after is purely speculation, but, on the day, Harbinger recorded one of the best in Timeform’s history, a 140 rating putting him in the top dozen performers that Timeform had rated at the time, alongside Dancing Brave, Shergar, Vaguely Noble and Sea The Stars, and behind only Sea-Bird (145), Brigadier Gerard and Tudor Minstrel (144), Abernant, Ribot and Windy City (142) and Mill Reef (141).
Who would have known that there was a two-year-old about a month away from his debut that would soon enough surpass them all?
*Article first published by Timeform in April 2020
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