Dermot Kilmartin

The partnership that stands out most from his early record is with If Dora Could, a horse he has run five times without a win. That kind of repeated faith in one horse tells you something about how a young yard operates — you back the animals you have, you learn their quirks, and you wait for the pieces to fall into place. Five races together is a real working relationship, even if the results column is still blank.

It is worth putting the numbers in context. Training racehorses is genuinely hard. Even established trainers with decades of experience often win fewer than 1 in every 10 races they enter. For a yard in its first season, zero wins from 34 runners is not a scandal — it is the reality of learning a craft in public. The question is not where Kilmartin is now, but whether the improvement comes.