Paul O'Sullivan's terrific season with some very moderate horses is best reflected in his outstanding strike-rate, a figure that puts him very close to three-times premier trainer John Size.
After an opening season that he freely admits to have been a huge learning curve, a more-acclimatised O'Sullivan is now showing the sort of form that earned him 10 New Zealand training titles and a victory in the 1989 Japan Cup with champion mare Horlicks.
O'Sullivan has won 16 races from just 111 starters, giving him a strike rate of 14.4 per cent.
It's a mere one-tenth of a percentage point behind table pacemaker Size, whose 31 winners have come from 214 runners (14.5 per cent).
To illustrate how well both are going in relative terms, Size won the trainers' title in 2004 with 73 winners, and a strike rate of 13.3 per cent, while Tony Cruz was runner-up to him that season with a strike rate of 13.2 per cent.
Last year, of course, was Cruz's record-breaking year, when the former champion jockey did everything right at every turn and romped away with the title, a strike rate of 19.8 per cent and George Moore's all-time Hong Kong record to boot.
