King's Gambit

Since then, though, things have been tougher. King's Gambit hasn't found the winner's enclosure in almost two and a half years, and the form has been decidedly patchy — in the last six races, the record reads a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, a ninth, and two runner-up finishes. Those couple of seconds suggest the horse still has competitive edge and isn't entirely off the boil, but it's clearly struggling to recapture the form that made it dangerous at Newbury. More worrying is its record at the very top level: King's Gambit has run in Class 1 or 2 races eight times and hasn't won any of them. That gap between specialist track form and elite-level performance is a tale many horses tell — and it's the kind of gap that gets harder to bridge as time goes on.

Harry Charlton's yard at Beckhampton has been firing on all cylinders this season with 38 winners to date, so King's Gambit is at least in the hands of a trainer in form. The horse raced just a day ago, so it's still in active competition and being given the chance to rediscover what made it a winner. Whether another trip to Newbury — the one place where King's Gambit has genuinely flourished — might spark a late-career revival remains to be seen.