Huggable

The recent form, however, is harder to spin. Looking at the last six races in reverse order, the picture starts promisingly — two runner-up finishes — before sliding away into twelfth, sixth, ninth, and fourth. That early promise of a horse knocking on the door has given way to something more inconsistent, and Huggable has now gone eleven months without winning. That is a long wait.

Where the numbers do offer a flicker of encouragement is over longer distances. At a mile and three to a mile and four furlongs, Huggable has won 1 from 3 races — a 33% win rate, which is genuinely strong. That is one in three, a ratio most horses on the track would envy. The problem is that most of its racing has come at Class 5 level, the entry-level tier of British racing, and there it has gone 0 from 5. Winning nothing at the easiest level of competition is a blunt fact that is difficult to look away from.

Trainer Dylan Cunha operates out of Newmarket, the historic heartland of British flat racing, and has sent out 45 winners this season — a yard clearly capable of getting horses ready to perform. Huggable raced just yesterday, so it is very much in active campaign. Whether Cunha can find the right race over that longer trip, on a track that suits, remains the key question. The Epsom win shows there is something there. The job now is finding it again.