Horses to Follow

About the Book

Welcome to the guide for 2019. It contains fifty horses that are coming into their three-year-old seasons—colts or fillies, potential classic winners or useful handicappers in the making. The aim of the guide is to supply us with as many winners in the 2019 season as possible. To aid our search for winners, we look back into the horses’ juvenile campaigns and analyse their runs as well as a potential rating to pinpoint target races months in advance as well as have a small insight to a few of the stables. Last year, we were blessed with a thrilling crop of three-year-old champion fillies. Alpha Centauri swept to save the mile division for Mrs. John Harrington and the Niarchos family, the multigroup 1 winning fillies Sea of Class, and Laurens for William Haggas and Karl Burke respectively. And the St. Leger runner-up Lah Ti Dah from that beautifully bred family of Oaks winner Dar Re Mi, trained by John Gosden. The difficult agenda we have on our hands is that out of that crop of high class three-year-olds, only two of them raced as juveniles. Sea of Class was a late foal, and Lah Ti Dar wasn’t given her debut until April at Newmarket. However, I believe we have seen enough to give us a proper insight to the British Classics of 2019. Now, why three-year-olds? This is the most exciting year in a horses’ racing career as their potential is unknown, and an improving horse can be very valuable to keep onside—for example, the crop of fillies. If you backed each and every one of their runs to a ten-pound stake you would be £495.90 better off for it. Last season at this stage we had already seen the Guineas winner (8/1, Saxon Warrior) and the Derby winner (Masar), and that is more than enough for me, and hopefully, you to delve into this year’s crop. The guide will include some of the top performers from the juvenile season, but generally, any racing watcher could throw a list together of highly rated horses together. So my aim—on top of the superstars—is to give us a group of three-year-olds that will come on from their two-year-old campaigns and hopefully finish off a better rating come the end of the year than the mark they started on, which should give us a nice crop of winners for the coming 2019 flat season.

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