Measuring the impact of a tongue tie geegeez.co.uk

Don’t tie your tongue when you talk about tongue ties!

First of all, I would like to apologize for the title of this piece: writes Dave Renham – it’s just my attempt at humor! However, it certainly points us in the right direction for the topic of today’s article.

Introduction

A tongue tie is a piece of material, usually made of nylon or a rubber band, that fits over the horse’s tongue and under the lower jaw. There are a few reasons why trainers use tongue ties. For example:

1. It helps prevent upper airway obstruction.
2. It can happen that a horse gets its tongue over the bit, which increases the jockey’s control.
3. It can help prevent the horse from potentially swallowing its tongue.
4. The goal is to improve performance through a larger air intake.

The jury is out on how effective tongue ties really are, so in this article I’m going to delve into the performance statistics of horses that have worn tongue ties in races and try to make a judgment.

The data comes from the UK National Hunt race between 1^st January 2018 and 31^st December 2025. Profits are calculated based on the Betfair starting price (BSP), with returns adjusted by 2% commission on all winning bets. About 90% of the statistics I will share are from the Geegeez Query Tool.

Tongue ties: overall performance

Let me start by sharing the general details of all horses that competed in tongue-in-cheek races during the study period.

As you can see there have been a total of almost 60,000 runs for horses wearing a tongue tie. It is clear that many horses wear a tongue tie at some point in their career. In fact, returns on Betfair SP have been slightly better for tongue-tie wearers than for those who haven’t – a loss of 2.7p in the £ compared to a loss of 4.1p.

In addition, tongue tie wearers increased their success rate by 12.4% to 11.9%. Perhaps tongue ties improve performance very slightly? Let’s dig some more.

Tongue ties: annual strike rates

I would first like to share the annual winning rates for horses that have worn a tongue tie, and the distributions are shown in the chart below:

There haven’t been too many fluctuations over the years. In 2022, the highest win rate was 14%; 2020 the lowest at 11.3%. But what about the return on investment?

The annual splits for this were as follows:

2024 was somewhat out of control with other years, with losses of just shy of 9p in the £. In six of the seven other years the returns were between +2.4% and -2.8%, so quite comparable.

Tongue ties: market grade

I am now looking at the market position and I have based the betting positions of the following table on Industry SP:

Favorites went ‘in the black’ with some solid stats across the board, while the second and third favorites also performed quite well, with relatively small losses at over 7,000 bets each.

For the record, there were 20 winners with a BSP price of 100.0 or higher, so again it makes sense to introduce a price cap for the rest of the article. This prevents an expensive winner from distorting the profit figures here and there. I will use an Industry SP price cap at 16/1 – so the remaining shared stats only include runners sent off at 16/1 or shorter. Here are the results for all runners wearing a tongue tie and priced at ISP 16/1 or less:

Nearly 42,000 horses still qualified using the price cap and overall the riders performed well – even pushing forward had we backed each individual horse ‘blindly’.

Tongue ties: disabilities versus non-disabilities

Let me look at disabilities versus non-disabilities – here’s what the splits tell us:

Non-handicappers, as expected, won more often and both finished in the black again. That is pleasantly surprising.

Tongue ties: racing class

What about race class? What did that show? The table below reveals everything:

The Class 1 stats might have been expected: a relatively modest win percentage and one loss. However, I have to admit that I expected slightly bigger losses. However, if we limit Class 1 racing only to non-handicaps, we can see that tongue-tied horses struggled even when the more expensive riders were excluded. This cohort of horses priced at 16/1 or less in Class 1 without handicap achieved 175 wins from 1033 (SR 16.9%) for a loss of £98.09 to £1 level stakes (ROI -9.5%). So the losses were not far off from 10p in the £.

Going back to the table, the Class 3 and 4 races both produced good profits; However, I cannot explain why this happened. If any reader has a logical suggestion, I’d love to read it in the comments.

Tongue ties: age factors

My next port of call was the age of the horses in question priced at 16/1 or less:

I find these statistics to be the most fascinating yet. Three year olds really struggled and although the sample size was small compared to many of the age groups, 325 runners was still a decent number. Losses of more than 50p in the £, coupled with a low strike rate, suggest these runners can safely be left out of future calculations.

An additional 3-year-old statistic related to market position is worth sharing: 3-year-olds who started in the top three of the betting won 20.9% of races (37 wins out of 177) for a hefty loss of £46.20 (ROI -26.1%). Before completely abandoning 3yos, I looked at their record at 18/1 or higher – just three wins from 222 attempts.

The other age statistics that caught my attention were for horses that were 11 or 12 years old. Both have delivered similarly solid profits and returns. My theory is that some of these runners have been overlooked or ignored in general. Most bookmakers and punters wouldn’t be immediately attracted to tongue-tied horses that were also 11 or 12 years old, so I think a few may have started a point or two higher than their actual price, giving us a value scenario over time.

Tongue ties and Topspeed

One of the relatively new angles that can be tested in the Query Tool is the performance of the Racing Post’s Top Speed ​​ratings. The graph below compares the PRB figures (percentage of rivals defeated) for the top three rated/ranked runners and those ranked fourth or higher.

We see a fairly strong positive correlation. Let me dig deeper by sharing the full records of the top three rated/ranked runners:

All three have made blind profits from 2018 to 2025, with solid-looking strike rates to boot. Betting on all the top three ‘blind’ would have produced a profit in five of the eight years examined, with two small losing years and a borderline break-even year.

Tongue ties in combination with other headgear

Next I wanted to see what happened when other types of headgear were used in combination with a tongue tie. For the record, there were a number of scenarios where two additional types of headgear were combined with the tongue tie, but with only 48 and 12 qualifiers respectively, these have been ignored. So the splits for the rest were:

Adding blinders or a visor has produced the worst results in terms of both win rate and returns. The hood and tongue tie combination, on the other hand, performed very solidly.

Regarding the results for the tongue tie alone, we see the following:

As can be seen, a small gain was achieved for the brigade which was nothing but tongue-in-cheek.

Tongue ties and running style

A quick look at the running style stats now: the PRBs for the tongue-tied runners were as follows:

We see the usual pattern where the graph slopes from left to right and the frontrunners are clearly doing the best. If we could have predicted which of the tight-lipped runners would take the lead early in their race, we could have secured a huge profit of £2,294.70 to £1 level stakes (ROI +29.3%). In contrast, hold-up horses lost £2352, equating to a loss of almost 20p in the £.

Tongue ties: Trainer corners

The last area I want to explore is some trainer data.

First time tongue tie

First, a look at the performance of trainers when their horses wear the tongue tie for the very first time. Trainers with at least 75 qualifiers priced at 16/1 or less are shown in the table:

These statistics were extremely positive for many of the trainers, with ten out of fourteen making a profit. Kim Bailey’s (and Mat Nicholls’) yard has achieved excellent results with a win rate of almost 23%, a return of over 80p in the £ and a PRB of 0.63.

From a negative perspective, two yards stand out: the performance of the O’Neill stable was very poor, with losses of almost 72p in the £. Similarly, the Greenall/Guerriero yard has achieved similarly disappointing returns (69p in £).

Second time tongue tie

Now let me look at the same 14 stables and their record when horses race at a tie for the second time:

This time the results are much less gambler-friendly, with only five trainers in the black. The stables of Bailey/Nicholls, Olly Murphy, Fergal O’Brien and David Pipe (just!) once again secured the win.

And the O’Neill stable performed much better with second-timers, albeit from a small sample, while the Greenall/Guerriero yard also put in a much stronger performance this time, although their runners as a whole still recorded a small loss.

Summary

Overall, the statistics for tongue-tied horses were a lot better than I expected. A number of positive areas have been highlighted that we can potentially benefit from in the future. Likewise, there are also some negative angles that you should take into account.

At some point in the future I’ll look at flat race data for tongue tie wearers to see what that tells us.

Until next time…

– DR

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