Favorites in All-Weather (AW) Racing in 2026
Friends of mine who go racing once or twice a year often call me in advance for some ‘tips’, writes Dave Renham.
My first answer is always the same: “What exactly do you mean by tips?”
And their the answer is invariably the same: “winners Dave, I want to support as many winners as possible!”
“Ah!”, I answer, “then it’s simple – just restore all favorites”.
After my opening gambit, I go on to explain the rationale behind such a seemingly funny answer: that to give them the best chance of backing as many winners as possible on the day, backing favorites is the best way forward.
For serious gamblers, of course, the question would be different, as making money in the longer term is about finding value, not winners. If it was as simple as backing winners, we’d all be backing the favorite and making a lot of money. In that sense, favorites are just like any other market position can offer value, but this obviously does not apply to all market leaders.
Favorites for all weather conditions in general
In this article, my quest is to find the groups of favorites that have offered value in the past, or groups that have offered little value. Bad value favorites essentially give us two options; we can put them on the exchanges, or we can look for a viable option among the remaining participants.
The data for this article covers UK AW Racing from 2018 to 2025. Profits are calculated on a fair starting price (BSP) basis, with returns adjusted with a 2% commission. I’m using Betfair Exchange favorites for this (clear favorites only), so let’s start by showing the results for all these AW market leaders over the eight-year study period:
The losses are quite modest at just under 3p in the £, so there seems to be hope when it comes to finding one or two positive favored angles. In terms of the betting returns on favorites, here are the annual breakdowns:
Last year would actually have made a profit, but in 2020, 2022 and 2023 all losses were greater than 5p in £.
All-weather favorites by Racing type
What about different breed types? Let me first share the handicap vs. non-handicap numbers for favorites:
As we can see, there have been slightly smaller losses among non-disabled people. That said, the non-disabled girls favorites lost over 5% thanks to 549 winners from 1267 (SR 43.3%), for a loss of £64.28 (ROI -5.1%). In fact, this is where my first two negative angles come in, viz 2 years girls only And Class 2-4 girls:
Once losses reach the 10% mark, I consider that a strong negative as far as the favorites are concerned. Both subsets are significantly above that threshold; and although the theme is 2-year-old girls, 2-year-olds making their career debut and all-weather girls’ favorite have done very poorly thanks to just 38 wins from 126 runners (SR 30.2%) for a loss of £34.66 (ROI -27.5%).
On a more positive note for 2 years, the child handicap favorites have taken the overall win thanks to 297 wins from 918 (SR 32.3%, +£28.44, ROI +3.2%). This could have been improved if we limited the qualifiers to horses that had previously run at least once at the AW. This cohort won 33.3% of the time (232 wins out of 697) for a profit of £51.04 (ROI +7.3%). To be able to exploit this potential in 2026, we will of course have to wait until the summer.
Another race type to quickly mention is claiming races. Favorites have achieved returns of over 11% in these races, but unfortunately such races on the sand are extremely rare these days. For example, last year (2025) there were only two such races. So unless there is a change in policy, it seems unlikely that we will see many claims races.
All-weather favorites by Course
Have favorites performed better on some courses than others? Let’s take a look:
The Southwell stats are based on tapeta races, so only since the surface change; there seemed to be no point in combining the fiber sand results with them as they are no longer relevant. Southwell’s stats are the worst for the favourites, with losses around 6p in the £. Wolverhampton has been the happiest hunting ground for jollies, closely followed by Kempton.
In terms of Wolverhampton favorites, a group that has performed well are the runners who won at the AW last time, but at a different track (for example at one of the other five British AW circuits). This group made a profit of £69.44 (ROI +12%) thanks to 239 winners out of 581 (SR 28.9%).
All-weather favorites by Time of year
I would now like to talk about the ‘time of year’ and below are the quarterly profit strike rates:
Favorites had the best success rate in the first three months of the year, and the remaining statistics correlate with that time being best for favorites:
As we can see, the favorites from January to March would have lost us less than a penny in the £ across more than 7,000 selections. I assume this was the case because at that time of year 91% of all favorites had last ridden the AW, while from July to December for example this figure was less than 60%. Therefore, the focus at the start of the first quarter (January) is solely on the AW, while the AW season has already been going on for almost two months, and horses are starting to run regularly on an artificial surface rather than potentially switching back and forth from the turf. That would also explain the poorer returns in the last quarter. That’s just a hypothesis, but there is clear logic behind it.
Sticking with that first quarter, we have already seen that the market leaders in Wolverhampton have suffered the smallest losses. If we limit the Wolves favorites to just January, February and March we see: 586 winners from 1604 runners (SR 36.5%) for a profit of £96.53 (ROI +6%).
All-weather favorites by Class of race
A look at Race Class now. The splits are shown below:
The top two racing classes have proven profitable, but what is perhaps more interesting is the very poor performance of the favorites in Class 3 racing. The losses were significant: more than 13 cents in the £. Most Class 3 events were handicaps, and handicaps actually produced losses of almost 15p in the £.
My initial theory as to why favorites performed poorly in this class was that it might be down to variance, but I checked the Class 3 results from 2010 to 2017 and noted that they produced similar overall losses (11p in the £). I can’t think of any logical reason why the favorites have struggled in these particular races, but the long-term statistics suggest that this has been the case.
All-weather favorites by Days since last run
Let’s look further at how long it has been since the horse last ran, and there have been a number of time frames that have proven profitable over the past eight years:
Therefore, favorites who have had a very recent run, or anyone returning after a break of five months or more, have performed above the norm.
All-weather favorites by Headgear
Personally, I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to avid runners wearing headgear, and the favorites have had a bad reputation for wearing blinders during this period. They scored 27.2% of the time (382 wins out of 1405) for losses of £168.40 (ROI -12%). This performance was even worse if we focused only on handicaps: 305 wins from 1203 runners for a loss of £164.90 (ROI -13.7%).
All-weather favorites by To draw
I wondered how well the favorites fared among the worst draws, even though I knew data for specific course and distance combinations would be limited. What I wanted to know is how the favorites fared when they were in one of the three widest draws: Kempton over 6f, Wolves over 5f and Chelmsford over 5f. I currently believe that these three track/trip combos offer the strongest AW biases – and, from a positive perspective, to inside draws, I should add. I only looked at handicaps as they provide the most robust results in terms of draw data.
We are dealing with small examples here, as I expected, but all three confirm that the favorites really struggled.
Another draft bias I looked at was Kempton over 7f, but my reading of that bias is that horses have to be drawn very wide (in double-digit stables) to be really disadvantaged there. So I looked at the performance of the favorites from the three widest draws above 7f at Kempton, with the caveat that the draw must be a double-digit draw. With such restrictions there were only 30 horses favorite in those conditions, but they struggled with only 5 wins and losses were steep: 46p in the £.
All-weather favorites by Trainer
Finally, I wanted to see which trainers did well with favorites and which ones didn’t. Let me first give an overview of the trainers whose A/E index (based on BSP) is 1.15 or higher. This type of figure suggests that their favorites have been very good value. To qualify, a trainer must have had at least 75 horses that started as favorites.
It’s nice to see a number of different trainers appearing and it does indeed make sense that lesser known names will pop up when you look at such an obvious market leader spot. Jim Goldie tops the list with an excellent 1.50 A/E index and all seven on the chart have unsurprisingly been blindly profitable, as the table below shows:
However, not all trainers have been successful in taking over the market leader. The table below shows the handlers who had posted losses of more than 25p in the £ (again, minimum 75 runs to qualify).
The most interesting name on the list for me is Charlie Johnston; his father Mark had a very good record of favorites at the start of this time frame. From 2018 until he retired at the end of 2022, his record among favorites was an impressive 144 winners from 331 (SR 43.5%) for a profit of £54.25 (ROI +16.4%), A/E (BSP) 1.13. There has been a marked change in the favorites’ success since Charlie took over, perhaps due to a change in focus or training way of working.
Conclusion
This article has highlighted many positive and negative points. I have included the most important ones in the table below as a kind of ‘ready reckoner’. I excluded the trainers because their tables are close and easily accessible.
I hope this article will be useful throughout the rest of the AW season and the rest of 2026 as a whole. Obviously we can’t always tell who will be the favorite, especially in highly competitive races. However, if we can return as close to the start as possible, we should know the preferred pre-race about 95% of the time.
– DR
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