Joe Leavy

The most telling partnership on his CV is with trainer Richard Hannon, where Leavy has won 14 times from 152 rides together. That works out at just under 1 in every 11, which might sound modest, but Hannon runs a huge string and places horses all over the calendar — getting regular winners from that yard means you're trusted, and trust in racing is earned slowly. It's a relationship worth watching.

Where Leavy genuinely stands out is on normal ground conditions, where he wins at a rate of 16 from 105 races — roughly 1 in every 6 or 7. That's meaningfully better than his overall average and suggests he's at his most fluent when conditions aren't playing tricks on either horse or rider. Some jockeys thrive in the mud; Leavy, the numbers suggest, is happiest when the ground is fair and the race is run on merit.

His record at Ffos Las is also worth flagging. Five winners from 20 rides at that track is 1 in every 4 — well above his season average — and that kind of course form is exactly what trainers and owners scan for when they're picking a jockey for a specific day. Small samples can mislead, but 20 rides is enough to take seriously.

The one thing to keep an eye on is the dip in his win rate, down from 13% last year to 10% this season. That's not a crisis — plenty of jockeys ride through soft patches — but it does represent a slide from roughly 1 in every 8 rides producing a winner to 1 in every 10. Whether that's a blip or the start of a trend will probably define how his career looks this time next year.