Veld

What keeps this interesting is who is doing the training. Hughie Morrison runs a respected yard out of East Ilsley in Berkshire, a village that has been home to serious racehorses for generations, and this season the stable has sent out 20 winners — a healthy return that shows the operation knows how to get a horse to win. When a yard is firing like that, the horses that haven't yet broken their duck tend to attract a bit of patience from the team, because they know what a winning yard looks like and they know this horse isn't there yet for reasons worth understanding.

Veld raced just yesterday, which means this profile is almost a live dispatch. Whatever happened in that outing — a seventh, if the recent pattern holds — the horse is clearly in regular work and being given every chance to find its feet. At three years old, there is still time. Some horses simply take longer to work out what racing is asking of them, and a yard with 20 winners on the board this season is not short of confidence. Whether Veld eventually justifies that patience is the question still very much unanswered.