Fond Farewell

The recent form makes for uncomfortable reading: finishing 9th, 6th, 8th, 7th, and then two blank results before that. There's no obvious upward curve here, no sign of a horse suddenly rediscovering its best. It raced just three days ago, which tells you the team is keeping it busy and looking for an opening, but so far none has appeared.

Where Fond Farewell does at least give its backers something to work with is over a trip of a mile and three to a mile and four furlongs. At that distance it has won 1 from 5 races — a 20% win rate, or roughly 1 in every 5 — which is a dramatic improvement on its overall record and suggests the horse genuinely needs that extra distance to be seen at anything close to its best. Get the trip right, and it's a different proposition. Get it wrong, and you're probably watching it trail home mid-pack again.

The yard behind it — Oliver Greenall and Josh Guerriero, based in Cheshire — has had a productive season with 42 winners, so this isn't a struggling operation. They clearly know how to get horses to win. The challenge with Fond Farewell is that the record suggests it's one of their more stubborn puzzles to solve. At 7 years old, with time and opportunities both thinning out, the window for another day like Limerick in 2023 is getting smaller. Whether it can find a race at the right trip, in the right conditions, at the right moment is the question that's kept the yard trying for three years now.