Minnie Hauk

The highlights on that CV are extraordinary. She won three of the most prestigious races in the calendar as a three-year-old — the Oaks at Epsom, the Irish Oaks, and the Yorkshire Oaks at York — before finishing second in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Paris, one of the most famous races in the world. Her trainer Aidan O'Brien, who is based at Cashel in County Tipperary and has sent out 138 winners already this season alone, has since admitted that in hindsight they might have stopped there and given her a proper rest at the end of last year. She was only three, after all, and the Arc run was a big ask late in the season. But the good news is she came back bigger and stronger — O'Brien described her as "twice as wide" — and she picked up exactly where she left off.

Her most recent win came at The Curragh just six weeks ago, and O'Brien was delighted with how it went. He had wanted a good, honest pace so she could find her rhythm, and everything clicked. Jockey Ryan Moore reported she was travelling with all her old spark and just needed to be pointed at the line in the final furlong. Moore is her go-to partner — they have won all five of their races together, a perfect record — and that combination is one of the most reliable in the sport right now.

The one blip in that recent sequence came at Del Mar in the United States, where she raced a shade too keenly, got a little shuffled about, and never quite settled. Jockey Christophe Soumillon felt she over-raced on the day rather than ran below her best, and O'Brien made clear she would continue into this season. When a trainer looks at a second place and still talks about a horse staying in training with genuine excitement, that tells you something. Minnie Hauk is not a horse in decline — she's a horse with unfinished business.