Wizard Daily Report and Research - Sunday, 5 November 2023 - R&R posted at noon daily.

• Melbourne Cup How the favourites have fared.
• Research - Australian Trainers examining the top trainers around Australia and how they perform in different locations and under different conditions.

Melbourne Cup - The favourites

The full coverage (ratings, form, comments, stats, etc) for the Melbourne Cup meeting on Tuesday will be available later in the afternoon today.

Given the hype usually accompanying the favourite in the Melbourne Cup, I thought it might be interesting to look at how the favourites have performed in more recent years. The table below shows this for each year since 2010. Of the 14 favourites, or equal favourites, there has been only one winner (Fiorente in 2013) and three minor placings.

The table is pretty self-explanatory. The race result details for the Cup run are on the left-hand side, and then to the right of the jockey and trainer names you will find details of each horses lead in race.

Wizard Research - Australian trainers analysed (Tasmania, Canberra ACT, Northern Territory)

In this series of articles, we report on the best performing trainers in Australia - on metropolitan, provincial, and country tracks. Many of the names will be familiar to you, but there are others who are just as successful (in terms of strike rate) who simply fly under the radar. 

Today we look at the top trainers on the Tasmanian, Canberra, and Northern Territory racetracks, in terms of race wins, for the 2022-2023 racing season.

The data out of Tasmania is acceptable in terms of number of wins and starts. There is limited data from Canberra as there are not many meetings each year on its only track, with the local trainers mainly racing their horses in NSW. The Northern Territory has reasonable data if one combines its metro, provincial, and country stats into one table. That is what has been done. Because of low numbers for the smaller stables in the NT a cut-off of 10 wins for the season was employed in ranking its leading trainers.