Livano Bello

The partnership with jockey Brian Hughes has been given every chance to click. The pair have ridden together six times and are yet to win, though Hughes clearly remains the preferred option. At Class 5 level, which is essentially the entry-level tier of British racing, Livano Bello has run five times without a win — and that matters, because Class 5 is where horses go when the aim is to find a race they can actually win. Going winless at that level across five attempts tells you this is a horse that competes honestly but has not yet found the right race, the right day, or perhaps the right conditions to put it all together.

The trainer, Micky Hammond, operates out of Middleham in North Yorkshire and has sent out 25 winners already this season, so the yard clearly knows how to get horses winning. That makes Livano Bello something of an outlier — a horse in a productive stable that simply has not managed to convert. Recent form shows a second and a third in the last four completed runs, which is encouraging in the sense that it has been finishing close. The dashes in that sequence indicate races where it did not finish, which adds another layer of frustration to what is already a patience-testing story. At some point, a horse showing this level of consistency in placing has to be considered capable of winning one. Whether Livano Bello can finally make that happen is a question that is very much still open.