Siobhan Rutledge

This season she has won 4 races from 77 rides, which works out at roughly 1 in every 19 — not a flashy number on its own, but the direction of travel is what matters here. Last year her win rate sat at around 2%, meaning she was winning just 1 in every 50 rides. This season that figure has doubled to 5%, and in the last two weeks alone she has won 1 from 9 rides — an 11% clip that's more than double her season average. Short samples can flatter, but form spikes like this are worth noticing.

Her most consistent partnership is with trainer John C McConnell, with whom she has ridden 22 times for 1 winner together. A 1 from 22 record might look modest, but regular bookings from a trainer are a vote of confidence in themselves — it means someone in the yard trusts her enough to keep putting her up, and those relationships are often where careers develop.

The track where she has done her best work is Dundalk, where she has ridden 3 winners from 36 races. On the surface that's 1 win in every 12 rides there, which is a noticeably better return than her overall average. Dundalk is an all-weather track that races year-round and draws a competitive, consistent pool of runners — winning there regularly suggests she has learned its quirks and knows how to get horses running on that surface. She also appears to show her best form on normal ground conditions, with 3 wins from 38 races in those circumstances, suggesting she is at her sharpest when the track is neither too fast nor too soft.

Still only four years in, Rutledge is a jockey whose numbers are moving in the right direction at a point in her career when improvement is exactly what you'd hope to see.