The last Classic of the year, four days on Town Moor, and the biggest betting week of the autumn. The St Leger itself is at 3:35 on Saturday 12 September; the festival runs from Thursday 10 to Sunday 13. This page is our hub for the meeting: through the four days it carries odds compared across 20+ bookmakers for every race and OddsLens's call in every race, each one logged before the off and settled in public, exactly like the 5,625 calls already on the record. Below that, what our results database says about the course itself: 314 flat races at Doncaster since March 2025, favourites, the draw and the big handicaps.
The 2025 meeting ran Thursday 11 to Sunday 14 September, 31 races. Favourites won seven of them, which is a 23% strike rate against the course's usual 32%, and eight winners were returned at 10/1 or bigger. The features went like this.
| Day | Race | Winner | SP | Favourite finished |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thu | May Hill Stakes | Aylin | 5/1 | 7th (11/10) |
| Thu | Park Hill Fillies' Stakes | Santorini Star | 7/2 | 4th (5/2) |
| Thu | Weatherbys £300,000 2-y-o | Calendar Girl | 7/2 | 4th (9/4) |
| Fri | Flying Childers Stakes | Revival Power | 17/2 | 6th (9/4) |
| Fri | Doncaster Cup | Sweet William | 10/11F | Won |
| Fri | Flying Scotsman Stakes | Avicenna | 11/2 | 2nd (5/4) |
| Sat | Champagne Stakes | Puerto Rico | 15/2 | 4th (6/5) |
| Sat | Portland Handicap | Eternal Sunshine | 12/1 | 10th (10/3) |
| Sat | Park Stakes | Marvelman | 13/2 | 9th (5/4) |
| Sat | St Leger Stakes | Scandinavia | 2/1F | Won |
| Sun | Sceptre Fillies' Stakes | Fair Angellica | 11/1 | 12th (7/2) |
| Sun | City of Doncaster Handicap | Rogue Diplomat | 14/1 | 9th (9/2) |
The shortest-priced favourite of the week, Sweet William, won, and so did Scandinavia in the Leger. Almost everything else in the features was beaten, and the handicaps were brutal: Shazani at 40/1 in the Leger Legends race, Pathein at 28/1 in the St Leger consolation maiden, Devil's Advocate at 20/1 on the Thursday. Day by day the favourites went three from eight, two from eight, two from seven, and none from eight on the Sunday.
One meeting is an anecdote. Here is the course over eighteen months: every flat race at Doncaster from March 2025 to August 2026 in our results database, 314 races and 3,105 runners at official starting price.
Favourites at Doncaster win about as often as anywhere else and lose you less. A 32% strike rate is the national picture, but the average Doncaster favourite goes off at 3.39 (a shade under 5/2) rather than 3.10, so the ones that win pay a little more. Backing every one of them still loses money, just less than half as much as the same bet elsewhere. That is not a system. It is a warning against the festival habit of ignoring the jolly because "big fields, big prices".
Doncaster's sprint course is a straight, wide, flat mile, and the folklore says it is fair. The numbers say nearly fair, with a lean to the low stalls. We took every five, six and seven-furlong race with eight or more runners since March 2025, split each field into thirds by stall number, and counted the winners.
| Stalls | Races | Share of runners | Share of winners |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lowest third | 150 | 36.2% | 40.7% |
| Middle third | 150 | 33.3% | 34.7% |
| Highest third | 150 | 30.5% | 24.7% |
Low stalls won about 12% more often than their share of the runners, high stalls about 19% less. That is a real edge and a small one. For comparison, the high third at Goodwood over the same period won 22% against a 33% fair share, which we wrote up in July. At Doncaster the draw is a tie-breaker, not a reason to back or bin a horse, and in the Portland's 20-plus runner field it matters less than where the pace is.
The Portland, the City of Doncaster, the Mallard and the rest of the Sunday card are the reason a lot of people are at Doncaster in the first place. In our window Doncaster ran 44 flat handicaps with 14 or more runners, an average field of 16.8.
Read that last number carefully before you act on it. Favourites in Doncaster's big handicaps have won one in four and shown a profit, on 44 races. That is a season and a half of data, not a law of nature, and one more Eternal Sunshine at 12/1 would dent it. What the 44 races do support is the boring conclusion: the winner of a 17-runner handicap is usually a 10/1 shot, sometimes the favourite, and almost never the 33/1 hunch. We measured the big-price myth across 179,202 runners; Doncaster is no exception to it.
Flat races at Doncaster since March 2025, trainers and jockeys with at least 15 runners and four winners. Strike rate is wins over runs; the return is £1 on every runner at SP.
| Trainer | Wins / runs | Strike rate | £1 return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roger Varian | 11 / 35 | 31.4% | +5.2% |
| Richard Hannon | 11 / 54 | 20.4% | +6.3% |
| David O'Meara | 11 / 111 | 9.9% | −45.2% |
| K R Burke | 10 / 62 | 16.1% | −28.5% |
| Andrew Balding | 8 / 45 | 17.8% | −1.5% |
| George Scott | 7 / 28 | 25.0% | +45.3% |
| John & Thady Gosden | 7 / 31 | 22.6% | +28.1% |
| Simon & Ed Crisford | 6 / 24 | 25.0% | +18.4% |
| Jockey | Wins / runs | Strike rate | £1 return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sean Levey | 11 / 43 | 25.6% | +43.7% |
| Callum Rodriguez | 10 / 45 | 22.2% | 0.0% |
| Billy Loughnane | 10 / 57 | 17.5% | −26.0% |
| Oisin Murphy | 9 / 38 | 23.7% | +42.9% |
| Kevin Stott | 9 / 46 | 19.6% | +0.5% |
| David Egan | 8 / 30 | 26.7% | −4.8% |
| James Doyle | 7 / 25 | 28.0% | −5.9% |
The usual caution applies twice over. Thirty runs is a small sample, and the yards with the best strike rates here are the yards with the best horses everywhere; David O'Meara's 111 runners tell you who sends the most horses to Doncaster, not who to follow. Treat the tables as background, not as a reason.
Since April 2026 the OddsLens model has made 98 calls at Doncaster, every one logged before the off with the best price at that moment. Twenty-six won, a 26.5% strike rate, for a +5.1% return at the logged prices and an average closing line value of +8.9%, meaning the price we logged was on average nine per cent bigger than the price the market closed at. Across every course the same record is 5,311 calls, 29.8% winners and a return of +0.5%. Ninety-eight is a small sample and a festival can turn it negative in an afternoon; if it does, you will see it on the same page as the good months.
Festival weeks are the hardest markets of the season to beat, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Doncaster in September has huge fields, ground that can go from good to soft between the Thursday and the Sunday, and a card built around handicaps designed to be impossible. OddsLens will make a call in every race anyway, because that is the deal: every race, logged before the off, losses left in. If it has a bad Leger week, you will see exactly how bad, next to everything else.
Follow the festival free → Check the record first
Don't. Check it instead. Since April 2026 every top call the OddsLens model has made, 5,500+ of them, sits on a public ledger with the odds at the moment of the call and the official result. For context, backing every favourite over the same races lost about 10p per £1; we published that data too. We show the maths, not promises, and the record updates every evening through the festival.
Method. Doncaster figures cover every flat race at the course from 29 March 2025 to 15 August 2026 in the OddsLens results database, official returns, starting price, non-runners excluded. "Favourite" means the shortest starting price in the race; joint favourites are each backed for £1. The draw study uses races at 5, 5½, 6, 6½ and 7 furlongs (all on the straight course) with at least eight drawn runners; each field is split into thirds by stall number, so the low third holds the spare runner when the field does not divide by three, which is why the runner shares are unequal. Big handicaps are races with "handicap" in the title and 14 or more runners at SP. The 2026 card, times, entries and prize money are from the racing data feed on 8 September and may change at final declarations. The OddsLens record figures are as at 8 September 2026 and update daily on the record.