What might have been…

In the absence of a real Burghley, it’s fun to speculate on how this year’s leaderboard might have looked – even though such “events” can never be used to give prize money or influence Olympic selection. Diarmuid Byrne from EquiRatings plays out a simulated competition

- Pippa Roome

ANOTHER “lost” competition. We have had longer to digest the disappointment that Burghley wasn’t going ahead than we had for Badminton, but despite this and the fact we have some real sport starting up again now, we are still missing the big fixtures of this season.

So while we wait, we at EquiRatings headquarters have dreamed up another “what if ” scenario based on the past performance data of our top horses and the prediction technology provided to us by SAP.

Burghley is a venue where speed always comes into play. To decide who should take part in this simulation, we took a look at our database to find horses who had made the time at five-star level at least once in the past two seasons, which gave us 52 pairs. We included the 2018 World Equestrian Games as a fivestar to ensure a nice mix of nationalities.

Now the fun starts – we place these 52 combinations into the same competition and we tell the machine (SAP Predictive Analytics) what variables to take into account.

The first and most important will be horse and rider performance over a five-year period. Understanding this allows our analysts to develop a model for assessing win-place predictions – how impactful a good dressage score will be at different levels, how different horses suit different events – and the margin of error during simulation.

One of the most important factors to remember is that the actual results of riders and horses contain what many would describe as “impossible” outcomes.