Storm Free

The breakthrough came at Nottingham on 9 April 2025, and Tate was refreshingly honest about the backstory: Storm Free had been finishing second repeatedly, largely because it was slow out of the gates and kept handing rivals a head start it couldn't claw back. Fix the start, and suddenly those near-misses made sense. Once it broke cleanly at Nottingham, it won without fuss. Tate himself described it as a horse that was "a maiden in all but name" — meaning it had the ability to win long before it actually did.

What's particularly interesting is how well Storm Free performs on normal ground — two wins from four races on standard conditions, a 50% win rate that is genuinely impressive. That's not a coincidence; that's a preference, and it matters when you're picking which races to enter.

After Nottingham, Storm Free kept finding form, adding another win at Leicester in October 2025. That makes it 2 wins from its last 6 races, and the recent form line of 6-1-2-3-1-2 tells an interesting story: the sixth-place finish aside, this is a horse threading through the field and landing in the money with real consistency. Tate has been open about the fact that a small physical setback disrupted the horse's season mid-year, but his view heading into the autumn was that Storm Free is better than its official rating of 83 suggests — which is essentially a trainer flagging that his horse is underestimated by the official handicapper.

Tate's Newmarket yard has sent out 50 winners this season alone, so this is not an operation short of options. When a trainer at that level singles out a horse and says "he should be one to follow," it's worth paying attention. Storm Free raced just yesterday and remains active — meaning whatever comes next is very close.