Fille Unique

That victory is worth looking at closely, because Musselburgh is where it all clicked. Before this week, her record at Class 5 level — the bread-and-butter tier of British racing — read zero wins from four attempts, which suggested she was finding one or two too good on a fairly regular basis. Scroll back through her last six runs and you see the story laid out: a second, then three middling efforts in fifth and sixth, then a third, and now a winner. The dip in form in the middle looked like it might define her, but she came back from it, and that matters.

Behind her is Bryan Smart's yard, tucked away at Sutton Bank in North Yorkshire. Smart's team have sent out 16 winners already this season, so this is an operation in decent form, and Fille Unique's win adds to a productive spell. Yards in that kind of rhythm tend to have their horses placed well and ready to run — it's rarely an accident.

At roughly 1 win from every 8 races across her career, she's not a horse you'd back blindly every time she turns up. But she places — nearly half her races have ended with a cheque — and she's shown she can win when conditions are right. The question now is whether Musselburgh suits her in particular, or whether this is the start of something more consistent. Either way, she heads into her next race as a winner, and that changes how a horse carries itself, and how a yard plans around it.