Crac De Megaudais

That one win came at Fakenham on New Year's Day 2025, which is both the highlight of his career and a detail that raises an eyebrow. Fakenham is a tight, quirky little track in Norfolk — a proper local track where local knowledge matters — and getting a winner there on 1 January takes a certain boldness from trainer Tom Gretton. Based in Inkberrow, Worcestershire, Gretton has quietly put together 12 winners this season, so the yard clearly knows what it is doing, even if Crac De Megaudais has not always been the one delivering results.

His most regular partner in the saddle has been Robert Dunne, and their record together is blunt: 0 wins from 5 races. That is not necessarily a damning verdict on either horse or jockey — plenty of partnerships take time, or simply never click — but it does mean the win at Fakenham came with someone else aboard. His recent form reads 1-4-3-5-4 going back through the last six runs, which shows a horse that was competitive enough in the middle of that sequence before drifting back a little. He has not raced in 70 days, so there has been a short freshening-up period, which sometimes helps a horse like this find a bit more enthusiasm.

At seven years old, he is past the stage where improvement tends to come in big leaps. But a horse with a win already on the board this calendar year, trained by a yard in decent form, is not without interest. He just needs everything to fall right — and at Fakenham, at least, he has proved it can.