Old Habits

That sole win came at Southwell on 2nd December 2025, and it remains the defining moment of a short but tidy career so far. Southwell is an all-weather track in Nottinghamshire that rewards horses who handle an artificial surface well, and Old Habits handled it just fine. The fact the win came five months ago, with the horse only racing once since, suggests the team around it have been patient and selective — a deliberate approach rather than a scattergun one.

That team is trained by Olly Murphy, whose yard at Wilmcote in Warwickshire has been in seriously good form, sending out 146 winners this season alone. That kind of output doesn't happen by accident — Murphy runs one of the sharper operations in the country, and having your name above the stable door there is a decent indicator that a horse is being looked after and placed carefully. Old Habits, with its clean win rate and light campaign, looks like exactly the sort of project a yard like that manages with a clear plan in mind.

With a race just one day ago, Old Habits is very much in the thick of things right now. Two races is admittedly a small sample, but winning 1 in every 2 races you enter — and placing in the other — is a foundation that many horses never manage across an entire career. The next few runs will tell us a great deal about where this horse is really heading.