Stolen

What keeps things interesting is the yard behind the horse. Eve Johnson Houghton, training out of Blewbury in Oxfordshire, has sent out 42 winners already this season — that is a serious operation with plenty of firepower, and she is not the type of trainer to keep running a horse without believing there is a race to be won somewhere. Forty-two winners in a season means this is a yard that knows how to place horses and get the best out of them, so Stolen is presumably still on a search for the right opportunity rather than a lost cause.

At three years old there is still time, and horses do sometimes take a while to work out what racing is all about. But five runs without even a place means Stolen will need to find something meaningful soon if it is going to justify its place on the track.