Sugar Baby

The pattern of where Sugar Baby wins tells you more than the bare statistics. Put her on fast, dry ground and she transforms: 5 wins from 14 races means she wins roughly one in every three times conditions are crisp and firm underfoot. Softer, wetter ground is almost equally kind to her — 2 wins from just 6 races, or a third of the time. It is the ordinary racing conditions that seem to blunt her edge. What really stands out is Thirsk, a track where she has found the winner's enclosure twice in seven attempts, suggesting she knows the place and the place suits her.

Recent form has been patchy. Her last six races have yielded a single win sandwiched between some forgettable efforts — a fifth, a seventh, then wins and places mixed with another seventh last time out. That is the profile of a horse still competitive but no longer dominant, which is not unusual for an eight-year-old in the middling ranks. When she competes at the higher levels of racing, her win rate collapses to just 1 in 20, which tells you she belongs in the races she typically runs. Alec Voikhansky, her most frequent rider, has partnered her to 2 wins from 8 races together — a respectable 25% partnership — and Peter Niven's Barton-le-Street yard, which sent out 12 winners this season, clearly knows how to get the best from her. For a horse in her eighth year still out there racing weekly, Sugar Baby represents the honest backbone of the sport.