Betfred St Leger Stakes (Group 1)
Doncaster - 12th September 2026
“It’s impossible to really work out how good this horse is or how good he may yet prove to be, but this was a really impressive display on Town Moor from both horse and rider. Whatever else may be written about the 250th St Leger, Highwayman gets a big tick in the data box from TPD”.
Highwayman was 9th of 12 on his debut at Cork in May. Then he was 15th of 18 at the Curragh, 11th of 13 at Limerick and 8th of 15 at Naas in June. That’s not the form record by a typical classic winner and it was only 3 starts ago. Whether it was by design or not, this horse has been completely transformed by going up in trip and the leap required from winning a Killarney maiden over an extended 11 furlong trip in July to the Betfred St Leger at Doncaster 61 days later is an enormous one and should not be underestimated. Saffie Osborne will quite rightly take the plaudits for a superb ride and all of the headlines that will go with her achievement are well deserved, but she had a very willing partner and our data would suggest that really was no fluke about this performance from Highwayman.
I’ll cover the basic numbers first of all. A winning time of 3:03.33 was 0.24s under the TPD expected time figure for the race on good ground and a finishing speed of 105.92% for the winner would suggest a race where every horse had a chance, even if the pace was not entirely end-to-end. Action led the way once he eventually got to the front and he reached the 5 furlong point at the entrance to the home straight in 2:02.50. For some context, in last year’s race on ground described as soft, Lambourn led the field to the same point in 2:03.45 and in 2024 Grosvenor Square reached the same point in 2:04.16 on good ground. Action had done his job in front without entirely stretching the field and in reality, the Ballydoyle horses simply weren’t good enough to go with Highwayman and Enceladus in the closing stages anyway. As our post-race summary above shows, Highwayman ranked 1st for all of our in-race speed metrics and both his top speed and run out speed figures were above our expected average numbers for the winner of this race. The front pair pulled more than 4 lengths clear of the rest in the closing stages and I think we can use their stride frequency data to explain why.
The pace began to lift once they turned into the home straight as first Golden Story (11.84s) and Alderman (11.72s) recorded race best furlong splits, but there were only 2 horses who were able to quicken again into the penultimate furlong and they were Highwayman (0.32s quicker) and Enceladus (0.15s quicker). The pair of them were clearly the best horses on the day and it is often the case that the horse that races in the most efficient fashion normally wins the race. In this case, the pair of them recorded the lowest minimum average stride frequency figures in the field. Highwayman dropped from a race average of 2.13 per second to 2.05 and Enceladus dropped from a race average of 2.06 strides per second to 1.96. It doesn’t always work this way. In last year’s race, there were 5 horses with a lower minimum stride frequency figure than Scandinavia, but given what he has gone on to achieve over 2 miles and beyond this season, his class was probably more than enough to compensate for any lack of efficiency. It’s one of the angles that I like to look at in the data from TPD and it would suggest to me that the best 2 horses in the St Leger were value for the margin that they put between themselves and the rest.
This was an efficient ride on an efficient horse from Saffie Osborne, who always had her mount in the ideal position and given that his average stride length figure (24.90 ft) was considerably shorter than the 25.75 ft recorded by Enceladus, being in front of Billy Loughnane when the pace lifted was a key decision. Once in front, Highwayman always seemed likely to hold on and having gone through the line with a run out speed of 34.9 mph, it seems highly likely that he had more in the tank had it been required. A case could perhaps be made that Enceladus seemed to lug in behind Highwayman at times and the winner did drift a little to his right, but the winning margin of 2.5 lengths (0.37s) would leave me in little doubt that the right horse won the St Leger. He’s won a Killarney maiden, a Listed race at Leopardstown and now a classic on his first try in Group 1 company, all in less than 2 months. It’s impossible to really work out how good this horse is or how good he may yet prove to be, but this was a really impressive display on Town Moor from both horse and rider. Whatever else may be written about the 250th St Leger, Highwayman gets a big tick in the data box from TPD.