Most horse racing statistics you will find online are about one horse, one jockey or one afternoon. These are different. They describe the sport itself, measured across every race in our UK, Irish and Hong Kong archive: about 227,000 races and 2.2 million runner records. Where a figure could be read two ways, we have said how it was counted.
The archive in one table
| UK and Ireland | Hong Kong | |
|---|---|---|
| First race in the archive | 2 January 2011 | 22 September 1979 |
| Races | 197,526 | 30,112 |
| Runner records | 1,864,626 | 365,326 |
| Different horses | 155,221 | 16,541 |
| Jockeys | 6,591 | 606 |
| Trainers | 4,041 | 505 |
| Racecourses | 86 | 2 |
A racing day
The UK and Ireland ran an average of 36 races on each racing day between 2023 and 2025. The busiest day had 77. Hong Kong is the opposite: a meeting has between 8 and 11 races, 9.5 on average, and happens on about 87 days a year.
Across a full year, the UK programme is steady at between 11,900 and 13,300 races, apart from 2020, when it fell to 10,287. May is the busiest month, averaging about 1,354 races, and February the quietest at 767. Hong Kong does not race at all in August.
How big is a field
The average UK race has 9.5 runners, and Hong Kong’s has 12.1. The UK breaks down like this:
| Runners | Share of races |
|---|---|
| 1 to 4 | 5% |
| 5 to 7 | 28% |
| 8 to 10 | 32% |
| 11 to 14 | 26% |
| 15 or more | 8% |
Almost half of all UK races, 44.7%, have ten or more runners. The biggest field on record is 40. Hong Kong’s largest is 21.
Chases run with the smallest fields, an average of 7.9. Hurdles have the largest at 10.2, ahead of flat turf at 9.6 and the all-weather at 9.4.
How often things go wrong
Over fences, quite often. Of every 100 runners in a UK chase, almost 15 are pulled up and more than four fall. Over hurdles it is about nine and a half pulled up and nearly two falling. On the flat the figures are tiny: 0.3% pulled up and 0.04% falling on turf.
The most common result code that is not a finishing position is PU, pulled up, recorded 78,682 times. Falls are next at 18,364, then unseated riders at 12,205. In Hong Kong, the most common is a veterinary withdrawal, 3,976 of them.
How long is a career
Short. The median UK horse in our archive has run 7 times. 8.7% have run once, almost one in three has run fewer than five times, and 18.2% have run twenty or more. The busiest has raced 202 times.
That matters to anyone modelling form, because it means a lot of horses simply have not run enough to measure. A rolling average over five runs is an average over one run for a horse that has raced once. The statistic that looks dull here is the one that does the most damage in a model.
Where races are run
Wolverhampton has staged more UK races than any other course since 2011, 10,636, followed by Lingfield, Kempton, Southwell and Newcastle. All five race on all-weather surfaces. In total, flat turf provides 80,074 races, the all-weather 45,460, hurdles 43,675 and chases 28,317.
The commonest UK distance is six furlongs, 12,284 races, and the second is two miles, 12,101. In Hong Kong it is 1200 metres, 7,636 races, a quarter of the total.
What was timed
Hong Kong has section times for nearly every race since 1979 and for each runner from 2008. UK finishing times and sectionals begin in 2017 and reach about 91% of British runners from 2024, with none in Ireland. That gap is the main reason timing statistics need a footnote.
Counting it yourself
If you quote these figures, say they were measured on our archive at the start of October 2026, and tell us if you cannot reproduce one. The tables are in the datasets and the API. The UK overview and the Hong Kong guide go through each market.
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