Dhahabi

What makes Dhahabi interesting is how specific his strengths are, and how little they've been able to deliver lately. Put him on normal ground and he transforms: 2 wins from 9 races on those conditions, a win rate of roughly 22 percent. Stick him at distances between a mile and six furlongs and two miles, and he's suddenly capable: 2 wins from just 6 races, which is a 33 percent win rate. Those are genuinely good numbers. His one top-level success came in a Class 2 race at Newmarket on 22 September 2022, his breakthrough win, and it set the template for what he could do. He won again at the Meydan track in the Gulf, suggesting he's a horse with some quality, but also one who perhaps needed the right set of circumstances.

Ian Williams' yard at Portway in Worcestershire has been in excellent form this season with 96 winners already, so Dhahabi isn't being ignored or left to rot. The trainer clearly still believes there's a race to be won here, otherwise he wouldn't have run the horse yesterday. But at this stage of his career, with that long gap since the last success and such poor form in the last six outings, Dhahabi looks like a horse waiting for a lucky coincidence—the right ground conditions, the right distance, the right class of race, all lining up at once. After more than two years of chasing that moment, you wonder how many more chances he'll get.