Duel Au Soleil

The most striking detail in that record is this: Duel Au Soleil has raced five times at Class 4 level — the bread-and-butter tier of British racing — and has not won once. Yet drop it into slightly different company or conditions and it found a way through, landing its first career victory at Wetherby on 31 October 2025. That win came roughly six months ago, and the horse has raced again just in the last day, so it is clearly still busy and still in training.

Jockey Callum Pritchard has been the regular partner, riding the horse in five of its ten races and winning once — a rate of 1 in every 5 rides together, which is actually a reasonable return given the horse's overall win rate of just 1 in every 10 races across its whole career. The partnership clearly has something to it, even if results have not always followed.

Ben Pauling's yard is having a strong season — 89 winners sent out already is a serious number and marks Pauling as a trainer operating with genuine momentum right now. A horse like Duel Au Soleil, sitting in the middle of the yard's string rather than topping it, is still benefiting from that environment. Recent form reads 3-8-2-3-1-2, which means the horse has been largely competitive across its last six races, with only one poor run in the mix. It is the kind of animal that will finish second or third more often than it wins, but those place finishes add up — six of them from ten races is a consistency that many horses never manage. The question now is whether Pauling and Pritchard can find the right opportunity to get Duel Au Soleil back to the winner's enclosure for a second time.