Alison Hamilton

That dip is the most striking detail here. Twelve months ago, Hamilton was winning roughly 1 in every 10 races — not spectacular, but respectable for a small yard finding its feet. This season, that number has fallen to zero from 28 attempts, which is the kind of run that keeps a trainer awake at night. Twenty-eight races is a meaningful sample. It is enough to say this is a genuine lean spell rather than just bad luck over a handful of outings.

Two names crop up repeatedly in the data, and neither has produced a winner yet. The horse Black Cab has run nine races under Hamilton's care without winning, while jockey Jamie Hamilton — presumably a trusted ally given they have teamed up ten times — has drawn a blank on every one of those rides. When your most-used jockey partnership has not converted in ten attempts, something somewhere needs to change, whether that is the horses, the targets, or the tracks.

None of this erases what Hamilton has built. Twenty career winners in four years shows she knows how to get a horse ready to win. The question now is simply when the next one comes, and whether this season's struggles are a blip or a sign that the yard needs to reassess how it is placing its horses. Every trainer goes through runs like this. The good ones come out the other side.