Bloodhound

The recent form tells a familiar story. In its last six outings, Bloodhound has posted a string of fourth and fifth-place finishes, with one run where it didn't complete the course. That is the racing equivalent of always finishing your meal but never getting to order dessert. The horse raced just yesterday, so it is very much still active and still giving its the yard — sorry, still giving trainer Shaun Lycett and his yard at Leafield in Oxfordshire — every opportunity to change that record.

The partnership with jockey Miss Megan Jordan is the most-used combination in Bloodhound's career, and together they have tried seven times without a win. That is not a criticism of either — sometimes a horse simply runs to a ceiling it cannot break through, and seven attempts is a reasonable body of evidence. Lycett's yard has sent out two winners this season, so they know how to get one over the line; Bloodhound just hasn't been the one to deliver it.

Almost everything Bloodhound does happens at Class 6, the lowest rung of British racing. It has run 17 of its 28 races at that level and has yet to win a single one of them, which is the sort of statistic that puts the difficulty of horse racing into sharp perspective. Even at the most accessible level of the sport, winning is genuinely hard — and Bloodhound is living proof. Five place finishes from 28 races means it has finished in the top three or four just 18% of the time, roughly once every five or six runs. Respectable enough to keep running, not quite enough to win.