What Are Official Ratings in Horse Racing, and What They Can and Cannot Tell You

The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) gives horses an Official Rating (OR) as a means of helping us determine the quality of the horse. Official BHA ratings in horse racing are an essential component of handicapping because it enables official handicappers to decide how much weight a horse should carry in each race. Horses can only compete in a certain Class of race if they fall within the specific OR range.

The BHA employs a team of handicappers for this, and publishes updated ratings weekly. The higher the rating, the better the horse is judged to be.

Each rating point equates to one pound of weight. So a horse rated at 115 should carry 7 pounds more than a horse with an OR of 108. The ratings are different in Flat & AW races and National Hunt events. Incidentally, the top Flat and AW horses are rated at 115+ while top NH horses tend to have an OR of 140+.

Official Ratings vs. Racing Post Ratings

Experienced punters are often more faithful to the Racing Post Ratings (RPR) than they are to the Official Ratings in horse racing. There is often quite a disparity between the two sets of horse ratings, and some betting experts believe you should consider selections that have an RPR of 10 points higher than their OR. However, you’ll find that this happens with several selections a race!

For example, you might see a horse with an OR of 73, but it fails to run to expectations. A quick check on the Racing Post website reveals that the horse had an RPR of 68. In other words, the Racing Post team believed the horse was overrated and issued a lower rating than the horse’s OR.

The Racing Post's assessments are widely followed, which is why the comparison between the two ratings is worth making at all.

I will probably write a separate post about RPR, but in this piece, it is all about the OR of horses.

Isn’t the Top Rated Horse the Best in the Race?

The simple answer is ‘no’ for a variety of reasons. As good as the handicappers at the BHA are, the OR they assign to each horse is an estimate which means the horse could be underrated or overrated. Likewise, the RPR of each horse is not a rock-solid indicator of a horse’s ability in comparison to the rest of the field.

As I said, there are a number of reasons why OR and RPR can’t be counted on 100%; not least the practice of trainers gaming the system. For example, a trainer could breed a 2-year-old horse for middle-distance races and enter it into sprints in the knowledge that it won’t fare well. Sure enough, the horse lacks raw pace and fares badly. It receives a low OR of 53 by the end of the season.

As a 3-year old, the trainer enters the horse in middle distance races under its low OR. ‘Amazingly’ it starts winning races off its artificially low mark. While this isn’t a frequent phenomenon, it happens more often than you might think.

People do test whether top-rated horses are profitable to back, and published strike rates and returns circulate widely. We are not reproducing any of them here. A return computed by filtering past results down to the subset where the filter worked — a race code, a class band, a race type, a recent-winner condition — is backfitted by construction, and the more conditions it takes to reach a positive number the less the number means. If you want to test a rating-based angle, the only way that tells you anything is to define the rule first and then record results forward.

Moving up and Down in Class

A horse dropping in class may be too good for the grade it has come down to; a horse moving up may be in form or may simply be outclassed. Both are worth knowing about when you read a card. What is not worth much is a published return for backing one or the other, for the reason given above: the figures that circulate are computed by filtering past results until a positive number appears.

A Horse’s Rating in Different Classes

The other thing people test is whether horses in a particular rating band do better in a particular class of race. The same objection applies, and more strongly: once you are selecting on a rating band AND a code AND a class, you are describing a handful of races rather than a pattern. Figures of that kind usually give themselves away by needing a qualifier — a part-season, a particular year — which is an admission that one good run is doing the work.

Final Words

There is no ‘magic’ OR where a horse suddenly becomes a sure thing. The BHA handicappers do a superb job of ensuring that handicap races are tough to call and the bookies tighten their belts when it comes to non-handicap events. Value is the order of the day: a rating tells you what the handicapper thinks, and the price tells you what the market thinks, and the only question worth asking is whether the gap between them is big enough.

One final point, and it is the useful one: look at how a horse's rating compares with the rest of its field rather than at the rating alone. A horse rated well below everything else in a race is usually rated that way for a reason, and the ratings are published precisely so that you can make that comparison yourself.