Killavia

What makes her interesting is not consistency but rather the pattern of her recent recovery. She finished third in the Dragon Stakes at Sandown last year before winning a fillies' stakes at the same track — signs of genuine progress. She was being aimed at bigger things, even fancied for the St Hugh's at Newbury, but a setback the night before that race derailed her momentum for months. Trainer Rod Millman, who runs a successful yard in Devon that has sent out 42 winners this season, says she has genuinely come right again now. Her most recent outing, just yesterday, saw her eighth, but that hardly tells the story — before that she was running fourth and sixth, the kind of placings that keep you moving forward between wins.

Killavia does struggle when stepped up to the very top tier: she has raced at Class 1 level three times without winning, which suggests her ceiling might be a notch below the elite. But she is a filly who knows how to win at tracks she likes, and she handles normal racing conditions. The partnership with jockey Lewis Edmunds has yielded one win from five rides together. She looks like a horse worth following during the rest of the season — not a superstar in the making, but a genuine improver who has just proven she still remembers how to win.