Outsiders are stealing the headlines at Ascot and the shocks are becoming more frequent

cAlandagan’s impressive defeat to the Ombudsman in the Champion Stakes at Ascot could well be the best race in the world this year when the final ratings are tallied in January, but it was not the reason why Champions Day made a brief but welcome appearance on the BBC’s main news bulletin on Saturday evening.

Instead, it was Powerful Glory’s 200-1 success in the Champions Sprint earlier in the card that caught the sports editor’s attention, and understandably so. In the same way that Leicester’s Premier League title success in 2015/16 is rarely mentioned even now without reference to the 5,000-1 on offer at the start of the season, it was a case where a starting price was worth a thousand words.

Cicero’s Gift’s 100-1 success in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes an hour later only reinforced the feeling that we have all been looking at the form book upside down. Two winners at a three-figure starting price on the same card? Ridiculous. Unthinkable. And…maybe even unprecedented?

However, it turns out – and if you also ignore the fact that both races were Group Ones – you only have to go back to the Lingfield meeting on November 19, 2024 for something similar to emerge. An otherwise completely forgettable all-weather card saw Epsom Faithfull (100-1) and Ashford Hill (125-1) both take the lead. At a jumps meeting at the same track in November 2023, Theyseekhimthere (125-1) and Ask Her Out (150-1) were among the winners.

In fact, Saturday’s Champions Day card marked the fourth time since January 4, 2023 – when there were 125-1 and 100-1 winners in Newcastle – that there have been two winners in Great Britain at 100-1 or greater on the same card. However, in the 15 years leading up to that meeting in Newcastle – around 22,000 matches in total – this did not happen once.

When dealing with extremely unusual events, it is essential to remember Nassim Taleb’s warnings about how easy it is to be fooled by randomness, and about the fact that even exceptionally unlikely and unrelated outcomes can still occur in clusters. However, over a period of twenty years, during which the British fixture list has remained relatively stable, between 1,300 and 1,500 meetings per year, it is still difficult to escape the conclusion that winners of 100-1 or greater are now, albeit slightly, more common than they were ten years ago.

For example, in the five years between 2015 and 2019 – that is, the five years before the Covid pandemic – runners with a starting price of 100-1 or higher won an average of 5.5 races per year, with an average success rate of 0.164%. From 2020 to 2024 it was 20 races per year and a strike rate of 0.242%. Everyone noticed the shock winner at Ascot on Saturday, but a jump in the number of 100-1+ upsets that actually dates back to 2020 has largely passed people by.

These are obviously still small numbers in the context of a racing schedule of around 10,000 races per year. After all, the average gambler operates at the opposite end of the market and from one week to the next will be sufficiently bruised by unexpected results to take eight or ten complete “skinners” on the chin for the bookmakers.

That doesn’t mean a slight increase in shock results is without some relevance, especially in the retail market (high-street betting shops), where a surprising number of bets are still settled at the starting price. What happened in 2020? Of course, Covid happened and that led to a significant change in the system for compiling starting prices.

Until the pandemic forced racing behind closed doors, starting prices had always been compiled from a breakdown of each runner’s price on the on-track bookmakers’ boards shortly before the start. With no racegoers and no bookmakers on track, the system switched to a survey of off-track prices.

There were bookmakers who warned at the time that this switch could lead to the starting prices of avid runners – the ones that punters back – being ‘shaved’, with any increase in the overall profit margin in the book being overshadowed by higher prices over outsiders. In other words, horses that might have been 50-1 in 2019 now leave at 100-1 or 150-1, while 6-5 favorites return at 11-10.

Their prediction seems to be coming true. Five years after the move to ‘industry’ starting prices, the five-year moving average return of back favorites has risen from -6.6% in 2019 to -8.8% in 2025. Being beaten by a 100-1 shot is one thing, but starting price bettors also pay a price for the daily favorites.