Summer Rain

The recent form does not offer much encouragement either. Looking at the last six races, the best she has managed is a fifth, which she has achieved twice, while a thirteenth place finish sits in there too. The trend is not pointing upward. She raced just yesterday, so she is active and being kept busy, but the results have not shifted.

Summer Rain tends to compete at Class 6, which is the lowest rung of British racing — essentially the entry-level tier where horses who struggle to win at higher grades come to find opportunities. She has run five times at that level and still has not broken through, which tells you this is a horse who finds winning genuinely difficult regardless of the company she keeps. It is not a case of running against horses too good for her; she has had her chances at the easier end of the game.

She is trained by Craig Lidster, whose yard is based in Norton, North Yorkshire. The operation has sent out 20 winners this season, so this is not a struggling set-up — they clearly know how to get horses winning. That makes Summer Rain something of an outlier in the yard, a horse who keeps running without delivering the result everyone is looking for. Sometimes a horse just needs one thing to click — a drop in class, a change of conditions, a race that sets up perfectly — but at this point, Summer Rain still owes her team that breakthrough moment.