Ceolwulf

After a quiet spell mid-season — three unplaced runs in a row — Ceolwulf has come alive at exactly the right time. He finished second, then won at Warwick in late March 2025, and has now followed that up with a win at Newcastle just this week, raced only yesterday. Two wins from his last six races is a sharp upturn for a horse whose overall record suggests he takes his time finding form. When he is on song, he is clearly hard to beat.

Most of his career has been spent in Class 5 races, the bread-and-butter level of British racing where the fields are competitive but the horses are not quite at the elite end of the sport. He has won 1 of 9 races at that level — about 1 in every 9 — which is modest, but the recent wins suggest he may be peaking at just the right moment. James Bowen has ridden him in 6 of those races and won once, a win rate of roughly 1 in 6, and that partnership will be one to watch if they team up again.

Fionn McSharry trains Ceolwulf from a yard whose location has not been made public, but the operation is in decent nick this season — 7 winners sent out already. A ten-year-old horse still racing and winning at this point in a career is genuinely pleasing to see, and McSharry deserves credit for keeping him in the kind of form that produces back-to-back wins. Whatever they are doing at the yard right now, it is working.