The perils of projecting Flat ratings to hurdles

How good will a Flat horse prove when sent over hurdles? So many good hurdlers have been recruits from the Flat that a method for converting ratings between the two codes is helpful and here I will demonstrate a simple method.

This is useful to gauge a horse’s potential over hurdles, though considerable variation is found at the individual level. We will discuss the reasons which may be behind this.

While this rule of thumb is easy to work with, it does not work well across the spectrum of Flat talent. It turns out there are diminishing returns at work: the better a Flat horse, the less well it tends to translate established merit between codes. We can make allowance for this by using a statistical model, an easy chart of conversion between official ratings of the two codes.