Last updated: 21 June 2026
There is something about Kempton under lights. On a cold winter evening the floodlights come on, the kick-back flies off the Polytrack, and a busy card of all-weather Flat races rolls through into the dark. Then, on a different week, the same course is staging the King George VI Chase on Boxing Day and the best staying chasers in the country are jumping the last in front of a packed grandstand. Two sports, one address. That dual character is the first thing to understand about Kempton, because it shapes the question every backer eventually asks: which trainers and jockeys actually pay here?
It is a fair question, and the wrong answer is everywhere. Open any preview and someone will tell you a yard “loves Kempton” on the strength of a strike rate, a bare percentage of winners at the track. A strike rate on its own is one of the most misleading numbers in the sport. The connections worth following at Kempton are not the ones that win often. They are the ones whose runners win more often than the market expected, and the space between those two things is where the money is made or lost.
Which trainers and jockeys are worth following at Kempton Park?
The ones whose runners beat their prices there, not just the ones who win often. A high strike rate at Kempton is meaningless if those horses were short favourites doing what favourites do. A Kempton record is worth backing only when its runners win more often than their Betfair SP predicts, over a real sample, and read separately by code, because Kempton stages both all-weather Flat and jumps and a yard can be deadly at one and ordinary at the other.
What makes Kempton Park different
Kempton has been staging racing for well over a century, but the version most backers bet into today is the modern one. After the all-weather conversion in the mid-2000s, the inner Polytrack turned Kempton into one of the busiest synthetic Flat tracks in the country, running through the winter and right around the calendar. The jumps course did not go away. The right-handed chase and hurdle track still hosts some of the biggest days of the National Hunt year. So when you look at a Kempton record, you are really looking at two records wearing the same name, and lumping them together hides more than it reveals.
Why a strike rate at Kempton tells you almost nothing
A strike rate only means something once you set it against expectation, and expectation lives in the odds. Race Advisor’s data makes the point cleanly. Across more than 68,000 Kempton runners since 2013, backing every one of them blind returns an actual-versus-expected figure of exactly 1.00, and it holds at 1.00 on the all-weather, over hurdles and over fences alike. The course itself hands you nothing. Paul Nicholls is the obvious illustration. He has saddled more than 550 jumpers at Kempton and wins with better than one in six, a strike rate most yards would envy, yet his runners fall short of their Betfair starting prices at an actual-versus-expected of 0.91. Back them blind and you lose money. Nicky Henderson is busier still, the highest strike rate at the track at around twenty-six percent across more than 570 runners, and even that buys only a slim edge of 1.07. The same logic flips the other way: a yard with a modest strike rate is not automatically one to swerve, because it might be sending bigger-priced horses that win their fair share at a price the market underrates.
So the bare percentage is the wrong place to look. The same is true of riders. The leading jockeys ride the best-backed horses, so their Kempton strike rates are high almost by definition, and backing them blind tends to grind a slow loss because there is no value left in the price. If a connection is genuinely profitable to follow at Kempton, what that really means is the market has been underrating them there. Their runners go off bigger than they should, and value appears. The catch is that this kind of edge decays. Once a Kempton angle becomes obvious, the prices shorten, the overpricing disappears, and a record that printed money for two seasons drifts back to break-even while still looking impressive on paper.
When a Kempton record actually signals value
A Kempton record signals value when the runners behind it have consistently beaten their starting prices, over a sample big enough to trust. Two filters do most of the work. First, demand a real sample. As a rough floor, look for more than a hundred runs at the track in the relevant code, not a dozen flattering results from one good winter. Second, demand persistence: a profit in several separate seasons rather than one golden campaign that drags the whole record into the black on its own. George Baker’s all-weather yard is the model of what that looks like. Across more than 500 Kempton Flat runners his horses have beaten their prices at an actual-versus-expected of 1.35, and that profit is spread across six separate seasons rather than banked in one. Over jumps, Ben Pauling clears the same bar, roughly 150 Kempton runners paying at 1.42 with winning years scattered right through the record. A yard that posted one enormous season and has leaked ever since is telling you only that variance happens.
Worth saying too: records that sit around break-even are not failures, they are honest baselines. At a track as competitive and well-bet as Kempton, most connections will sit close to a level line, because the floodlit all-weather cards are studied to death. The ones that stand clear of that line, on a real sample and across more than one season, are the ones worth a second look.
Reading Kempton trainers and jockeys by code and conditions
Treat any Kempton record as a prompt to investigate, never as a verdict. A blanket figure hides the conditions that actually decide races. The honest version of the stat is conditional: not “does this trainer do well at Kempton”, but “when does this trainer do well at Kempton”. Is the all-weather profit coming from sprints or from middle-distance handicaps? Is the jumps record built on novice hurdles or on staying chases? A yard can be lethal in one pocket of the card and a drain in another, and the blended number tells you neither.
The same applies to riders, and the all-weather jockey records put both traps in one place. Lewis Edmunds is the standout. Across roughly 245 Kempton Flat rides his mounts have beaten the market at an actual-versus-expected of 1.69, profitable in six of his seven years at the track. Nicola Currie makes the subtler point. She wins fewer than one in ten of her Kempton Flat rides, a strike rate that would get her crossed off most shortlists, yet her mounts beat their prices at 1.27 across more than 400 rides, because the value was never in how often she won. Over jumps the names change again, with Tom Cannon’s 254 Kempton rides paying at 1.31. So when a Kempton record catches your eye, this is a course record like any other, and the same discipline applies: read the form underneath it. Are today’s conditions, the code, the distance, the class of race, the ones that produced the profit? Or are you stretching an all-weather sprint pattern onto a staying chase where it never applied? The record opens the question. The conditions answer it.
Let the data keep you honest
Every read above is a hypothesis, and the only way to know whether a Kempton record is a real edge or a comforting story is to measure it. The measure that does this honestly is the actual versus expected ratio, the ratio of a connection’s actual wins to the wins their runners’ Betfair starting prices implied they should have managed. Above the value threshold and the Kempton record is paying its way. At or below it, you are backing a memory of past winners rather than a live edge, however good the headline strike rate looks. It is also the cleanest way to separate Kempton’s two codes, because a trainer’s all-weather figure and their jumps figure can point in opposite directions.
Race Advisor’s data covers more than ten years of UK racing and is built to answer exactly this kind of question, putting win-rate and actual-versus-expected figures on trainer and jockey records by course, code, race type and going, so a Kempton record can be judged on evidence instead of reputation. It also shows why timing matters, because a Kempton edge is a profile moving through time, not a fixed stamp. Lewis Edmunds and Ben Pauling are still beating the market across the last two seasons, Edmunds at 1.67 and Pauling at 1.61. Others have quietly expired: Nicola Currie’s lifetime 1.27 has slipped to 0.96 since 2024, and Gordon’s jumps figure has fallen from 1.29 to 0.75 over the same stretch. Same records, opposite verdicts, depending on whether you check when the edge was actually live. So a Kempton record is only worth following when its runners have beaten their prices, over a real sample, in the right code, and recently rather than once upon a time. Pull up today’s racecards, find a runner whose trainer or jockey “loves Kempton”, ask whether the record beats the market or just the field, and let our free Bet Tracking keep an honest record of whether your answer holds up.
