Blue Velvet

The six-year-old has won 2 races from 6 outings — that's a win rate of roughly 1 in every 3, which is excellent by any measure. There are also 4 placed finishes in there, meaning Blue Velvet has come home in the first three in 6 of its 6 races. A horse that has never finished outside the placings is a remarkably consistent animal, and that kind of reliability is exactly what the yard — sorry, what a yard like Mullins' expects to build on.

The career started quietly enough, with that first win coming at Thurles on 21 December 2024. Thurles is a tight, no-frills track in Tipperary, the sort of place where you find out quickly whether a horse is mentally tough as well as physically capable. Winning there suggested Blue Velvet had both. The most recent victory came at Punchestown on 26 January 2026 — a far bigger stage, and a result that signals this horse is stepping up to the task as the races get more serious.

The current form reads 11-1-2-3-7-1 going back through the last six races, and that tells an interesting story. Two wins bookending the sequence, with a run of placed finishes and one disappointing seventh in between. That seventh is the one blot, but every horse has an off day, and the response — a win next time out — is the mark of a genuine performer rather than a fluke merchant. At six years old and currently active having raced just 17 days ago, Blue Velvet looks like a horse in the middle of its story rather than near the end of it.