"Is It A Negative When Horses Run Past After The Post?"

Recorded September 2025 for PRIDE OF JENNI. Any figures mentioned are from that time.

What happens past the post

I was watching a replay of a 1,200 metre lead-up race and something kept nagging at me. Tempted wins, but once they go through the line a few of the beaten horses run straight past. Wootton goes by. Bevakt gets in front of Tempted too. So the question I keep coming back to is simple. Is that a negative? If a horse gets passed after the post, does it mean there wasn't much left in the tank, and does that matter when it steps up in distance next start?

The logical read is that a horse like Wootton, who is still going through the line and beyond it, might be better suited to 1,400 than a horse like Tempted, who had done his bit at 1,200 and got swallowed up once the pressure was off. That sounds neat. But I am not sure it holds. Horses get eased at different points. Jockeys pull up at different rates. Some horses relax the moment the whip goes away and others keep rolling because that is just how they are. So I do not know the answer. I am genuinely asking.

How much credit does a wide run deserve

The other half of the same race is the run Wootton had. Three wide with no cover the whole way. Every video watcher knows that is a hard way to race. But knowing it is hard is not the same as knowing what it is worth. How close should Wootton have got if he had the run of the race? Is he equal to the winner on that? Better? How far do you bonus him for the ground he covered?

That is where video watching gets slippery for me. It is easy to say a horse did it tough. It is much harder to put a number on it and then bet with that number. If you overrate the wide runner every time, you end up backing horses that were just not good enough. If you ignore it, you miss the ones that were.

And how much do you penalise the winner

Tempted got a beautiful suck in behind, came out at the right moment and went bang. Every favour in the race. Do you mark him down for that? He still won, and he still had to be good enough to take the gap. But the run he got was not the run he will get every week. There was plenty else going on too. Skyhook was trying to work through a gap and got blocked. So the finishing order in front of you is not clean information. It is the product of a lot of small things that may not repeat.

I will be upfront here. Video watching is not my art. My work is in the data, in the betting, in placing bets and moving markets. So when I look at a replay like this, I am aware I am probably missing things that a good video watcher sees straight away.

If you do watch videos properly, I would like to know what you actually look for in a race like that, and whether horses running past after the post means anything to you at all. Next time you replay a race, pay attention to what happens after the line and ask yourself honestly whether you would bet on it.

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From the full video: PRIDE OF JENNI | Max Bet Ep 9

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