William Of York

The most telling chapter of his story is what happened at Carlisle. He has raced there four times and won twice — that is a 50% win rate at one track, which is a remarkable number in a sport where even the very best horses win less than a third of their races. His biggest success came there in April 2024, when he won a Class 2 race — one of the top tier of races in Britain — in the Monet's Garden Go North final. Menzies had described him around that time as a horse who had grown physically stronger and was continuing to develop as a jumper: bold and quick over his fences, she said, and very rarely getting one wrong. That kind of jumping is what separates horses who can handle a big occasion from those who crumble under pressure.

His usual partner in the saddle is Ross Chapman, who has ridden him in 9 of his 25 races and won on him twice — a win rate of 22%, comfortably better than his overall average. At his typical level of competition, though, things are tighter: in Class 4 races, the bread-and-butter tier for a horse of his kind, he has won just 1 from 8, which tells you the Carlisle performance was genuinely above his day-to-day standard.

He has not won in his last 6 races, with his most recent victory now 27 months ago. For a 10-year-old, that gap demands honesty. But he raced just yesterday, so he is still very much in training and in contention. His owner, Mike Newbould, was refreshingly candid after that Carlisle win, noting that William Of York was not the yard's headline act, but insisting there was more to come — that you had not yet seen the best of him. Whether that optimism still holds after a long winless run is the open question, but a horse who can produce a Class 2 performance at Carlisle once is always capable of doing it again.