Mr J P Sutton

The most notable partnership in his short career so far has been with Joya Del Mar, a horse he has ridden three times without getting that elusive first victory. Three races together is enough to suggest a genuine working relationship between horse and rider, but the results haven't come.

It would be wrong to write Sutton off on those numbers alone. Every jockey who has ever won a race started with a record that looked exactly like this one. Two years in, the experience he is building — learning how horses travel through a race, how to judge pace, how to handle pressure — is the kind of thing that rarely shows up in a win column but matters enormously when the moment finally arrives. The first winner, when it comes, will make the whole record look different.