Desert Champion

The Chelmsford win proved to be a double-edged sword. His trainer Paul Midgley, who runs a busy yard in Westow, North Yorkshire — 39 winners sent out this season alone — explains that the race authorities immediately raised Desert Champion's weight by 10 pounds after that victory, which is their way of making life harder for a horse that has shown improvement. Midgley is candid about the effect: that weight hike was probably his undoing, and he simply hasn't run to the same level since. It has now been 14 months since that win, and his last six results — finishing 9th, 2nd, 8th, 8th, 7th, and 8th — paint the picture of a horse who occasionally flashes ability without being able to convert it.

The most common partnership in his career has been with jockey Mark Winn, who has ridden him in 6 of those races without a win between them. That is not a criticism of either horse or rider — the weight burden and a possible question about the right conditions have been the bigger issues. Midgley himself is uncertain whether Desert Champion is better suited to the all-weather tracks or racing on turf, and that kind of uncertainty matters. A horse racing on the wrong surface can look like a different animal entirely. At the level he typically competes — the lower end of the racing ladder — he has won 1 from 8 races, which is roughly 1 in 8 at that grade. That is modest, but the Chelmsford win shows the talent is there. The question is whether the right conditions can bring it out again.