Rubaud

At eight years old, Rubaud has won 11 of his 25 races, which works out at just under half of everything he has entered. That is a remarkable number on its own, but what makes it genuinely extraordinary is the company he has been doing it in. Nineteen of those races have come at Class 1 level — the very top tier of British racing — and he has won nine of them. Nearly 1 in every 2 top-level races he enters, he wins. Most horses never even compete at that level. Rubaud does it routinely, and then wins.

The record has a clear shape to it. Rubaud loves normal ground — not too wet, not too firm — and on those conditions he has won 9 of just 12 races, a 75% win rate that borders on freakish. He also has a particular affinity for Wincanton, winning 3 of his 5 visits there, and it was at Wincanton on 8 November 2025 that he claimed his most recent victory. Before that, he won at Kempton in October 2025, having also won there in February. Three Class 1 victories in under nine months, at two different tracks, in the same season. That is not a fluke — that is a horse operating at his ceiling and clearing it repeatedly.

Much of the credit goes to the partnership he has formed with jockey Harry Cobden. Together they have run 20 times and won 11 — that is a 55% win rate, which is an almost unheard-of figure for any jockey-horse combination at the top level. When Cobden gets the leg up on Rubaud, the smart money follows. Paul Nicholls trains him out of Ditcheat in Somerset, currently one of the most productive yards in the country with 95 winners already this season — and Rubaud is one of the reasons why.

His last two runs have brought a second and a third rather than another win, so the sequence has cooled slightly. But a horse who has won half his career races, dominated at Class 1, and is still active and racing at eight years old is not a horse on the slide. He is a horse worth watching every single time he runs.