Crooked Path

The recent form makes for interesting reading. In its last six races, Crooked Path has finished 5th, 2nd, 6th, 2nd, 3rd, 3rd — reading from oldest to most recent — and was racing again just yesterday. Two runner-up finishes in that stretch are particularly telling: close enough to win, not close enough to win. For a horse still without a career victory, that pattern of near-misses is either encouraging or maddening depending on how you look at it.

Daniel King has been in the saddle for all six of those recent runs, and together they are still searching for a breakthrough. Six races as a partnership without a win is not a long story yet, but it does suggest the combination hasn't quite unlocked whatever is needed to turn those places into victories.

The trainer is Denis Gerard Hogan, operating out of Cloughjordan in County Tipperary, and his yard has been in fine form this season with 58 winners sent out — a healthy number that shows this is an active, competitive operation. The fact that a horse from such a productive yard is still winless at four years old raises genuine questions about where that first victory might come from, though Hogan clearly knows how to get horses ready to run, given the numbers his yard is posting. Whether Crooked Path can deliver on its repeated near-misses remains the central question — but a horse that has finished placed in more than a third of its races, 6 from 16, is clearly not out of its depth. The win just hasn't come yet.