Stu Stewart

Hello, and welcome to Overlay. I'm Stu Stewart — a name that is, I assure you, entirely my parents' doing. The career path, however, was my own fault entirely.

I've been a licensed racing steward for over a decade, which means I've spent more hours squinting at photo finishes and reviewing barrier incidents than most people spend watching the sport altogether. As a steward, my job has always been to watch racing with ruthless objectivity — no sentiment, no favorites, just facts.

A few years ago I started digging into the numbers behind the sport I'd dedicated my career to, and I haven't looked up from the spreadsheet since — except to check the replays, obviously.

There's something genuinely thrilling about finding a pattern in the data that no one in the mounting yard could see with the naked eye: a track bias hiding in sectional times, a trainer's wet-track record that tells a completely different story to their overall strike rate. That's the buzz that keeps me going, and it's what this site is all about.

Hope you enjoy it — and maybe we can all help each other become a little bit better horseplayers.