Sinmara

Five months on, though, the picture is more complicated. Since that win, Sinmara has run five times and managed just three places from those races, most recently finishing fourth a day ago. She is clearly still being run — O'Brien's yard is too professional to keep a genuine prospect racing if she weren't learning something — but the plan to target the Irish Guineas hasn't materialised. Her win rate sits at just 17 percent, or 1 win from 6 races overall. That's not disastrous for a young horse still finding her feet, and she has shown enough (three places from her last five runs) to suggest she belongs in competitive races, but it is a long way from the horse O'Brien was raving about in April. The gap between a horse that looks like a star on debut and one that wins once in six attempts can be surprisingly small, but it is real. She is still only three and still learning, yet the trajectory matters: right now she is a decent prospect rather than the exciting one the stable thought they had.