Jonquil

The overall picture is just as striking. Four wins and four places from eight races means Jonquil has finished in the top three on every single start — a perfect placed record. That kind of consistency at the elite end of the sport is rare. The recent sequence of 1-7-1-5-13-1 shows there have been off days, as there are with any horse, but the ability to bounce back and win at Ascot this week after a run that saw it finish thirteenth speaks to genuine class. Good horses can have bad days. What matters is what they do next.

Behind Jonquil is Andrew Balding's yard at Kingsclere in Hampshire, one of the most productive operations in the country right now. With 202 winners sent out this season alone, this is a team that clearly knows how to get a horse to the races in the right condition, at the right time. Balding does not run horses in top-level races for experience — he runs them because he believes they can win.

First career win came at Sandown Park in August 2024, and in the roughly twenty months since, Jonquil has gone from a horse finding its feet to one of the most consistent performers at the top table. Three Class 1 wins by the age of four, with career earnings the natural byproduct of racing at that level, and a record of winning 4 in every 8 races — exactly half — puts this horse in very select company. With last week's Ascot win the most recent chapter, the story is very much still being written.