Captain James Cook

At this early stage of a two-year-old's career, not every horse wins quickly, and O'Brien's yard is one of the most ruthless in British and Irish racing when it comes to deciding which young horses have a genuine future. The yard has already sent out 125 winners this season, so the scale of operation means each individual horse is carefully monitored. For Captain James Cook, the challenge now is to figure out where he fits among the hundreds of young horses tested each year. That single top-3 finish suggests he has shown enough to keep racing, but the recent sequence — three runs in the sixties and seventies — suggests he may be finding the level tough at the moment. Whether he is simply a late developer or a horse working towards finding his own level remains to be seen, but O'Brien's record gives him every chance to find it.