Lady Bouquet

She is five years old and trained by Philip Kirby at East Appleton in North Yorkshire, a yard that has sent out 36 winners already this season — so this is not a quiet backwater operation. Kirby clearly knows what he is doing, and Lady Bouquet is one of the yard's regular performers at the level where she competes most often, Class 6, the bread-and-butter end of British racing. At that level she has won 5 from 30 races — that is 17%, or almost 1 in every 6, which is a genuinely solid return and suggests she is well placed in the right company.

Her spiritual home, though, is Wolverhampton. Two wins from 9 races there might not sound extraordinary until you consider that most horses go their whole careers without ever dominating a single track. She has found something she likes about the place — the tight, artificial surface suits her — and Philip Kirby has been smart enough to keep going back. Her most recent win came there on 6 December 2025, seven months ago, and her very first career win also came at Wolverhampton, back in October 2023. The track has bookended her story so far.

The recent spell is a harder sell. Her last six runs read 4-3-4-6-3-10, and she has not won in any of them. That includes six races alongside jockey Andrew Mullen, from which she has yet to get her head in front. A 10th-place finish in there is the kind of result that makes you wonder whether she is finding things tougher as her rivals catch up with her, or simply waiting for conditions to click back into place.

She raced just yesterday, so she is very much in the middle of a busy campaign. At her best — fresh, at Wolverhampton, in the right class — she has shown she can win. The question now is whether she can find that version of herself again.