Three Tribes

The recent form makes for grim reading. Of the last six runs, the best finishes on record are a second and an eighth, with the rest either further back or unplaced entirely. A second-place finish is the closest Three Tribes has come to any kind of reward, and even that sits buried in a sequence that has otherwise offered very little encouragement. The horse raced just one day ago, so it is clearly still being campaigned actively — the team has not given up, even if results have been hard to come by.

Robbie Geoghegan has stuck with Three Tribes through six of those nine races together, and the pair are yet to win a single one. That kind of loyalty from a jockey usually means something — either the horse is genuinely tricky to ride and Geoghegan knows its quirks better than anyone else, or there is a belief somewhere that a breakthrough is still possible. At this stage, you would need to be an optimist to hold that view, but in racing, optimists are never in short supply.