Betweenthesticks

The numbers that really stand out are at Wolverhampton. Three wins from seven races there works out at winning nearly 1 in every 2.5 visits — an extraordinary return for any horse at any track, and the kind of record that makes a trainer point the horsebox in that direction without much deliberation. On normal ground conditions, he is similarly reliable: 4 wins from 12 races, meaning he wins roughly 1 in every 3 races when the ground is playing fair. He is, as Ruth Carr puts it, genuine and straightforward — exactly what you want from a horse asked to race regularly at this level.

His partnership with jockey James Sullivan is one of the more productive combinations on the northern circuit right now. Sullivan has ridden him in 15 races and won 4 of them — a win rate of 27%, or roughly 1 in every 4 rides. That is well above the horse's overall career average of 16%, suggesting Sullivan and Betweenthesticks simply understand each other.

Form-wise, the last six runs tell an encouraging story: a win, then two seconds, a blip with a sixth and a ninth, before bouncing back to second most recently — all of this with a race just yesterday, meaning he is in the thick of an active campaign. His most recent win came at Pontefract on 21 April 2026, a result Carr had publicly flagged as a target beforehand. When a trainer calls a race in advance and the horse delivers, it says something about how well the whole team knows him.

Ruth Carr's yard has sent out 56 winners this season alone, which puts this operation firmly among the productive northern stables. Betweenthesticks is not the biggest name in the yard, but he is exactly the kind of genuine, competitive horse that makes a training operation tick.