Croagh Patrick

For a start, his career earnings have cleared £50,000 despite never having been rated above 100 — which puts him firmly in the lower tiers of the sport. His trainer Sam England cheerfully admits that his owner takes genuine pride in this, pointing out that Croagh Patrick might be the only horse in the country to sit below that rating and still bank that kind of money. The secret is in the places. He has finished in the top spots 21 times without winning, and his trainer describes him as almost maddening in his consistency: you think you've cracked the puzzle after a race, try the same thing next time, and he finds a new way to keep you guessing.

Where he stops being frustrating and starts being genuinely impressive is at Carlisle. He has won 2 of his 7 races there — a remarkable 1-in-3.5 record at a track where most horses are happy just to make the frame. One of those wins, in March 2022, was a Class 2 race, which means one of the better races run in Britain. For a horse operating mostly at Class 5 level — where he has won 2 of 19 races, or about 1 in every 10 — to step up and win at that grade suggests there is more ability there than his usual routine might suggest. His last win came at Carlisle as recently as December 2024, and his recent form shows a win and a runner-up, so at 11 years old he is very much still competing.

Jockey Jonathan England, who is married to his trainer and has ridden him in 27 of his 39 races, knows him as well as anyone. The post-race note after his Carlisle win is telling: he needed a distance of at least two and a half miles, and they had to use a claiming jockey just to get the weights to work in his favour. Croagh Patrick, in short, is a horse that demands the right conditions, the right track, and a bit of tactical creativity — and when he gets all three, he can still beat horses that look much better on paper.