Galeron

The bare numbers tell a modest story: 2 wins and 6 places from 22 races, a win rate of roughly 1 in every 11 outings. For a six-year-old, that record suggests a horse who is honest and competitive without ever quite being the best in the race. What gives the stats more texture is where those wins came from — Goodwood in June 2022, then The Curragh three months later — two different countries, two different tracks, both at relatively short distances. Since that Curragh victory, now 44 months in the past, he has not troubled the winner's enclosure once.

The level he competes at makes that drought harder to break. Hills has pitched him in Class 2 races — among the better races in Britain — eight times without a win. That is not an embarrassment; it just means he is consistently running against horses who edge him out. His best distance looks to be the shorter end of the sprint range, five to six and a half furlongs, where he has won 1 from 3 (33%), but even there the Class 2 ceiling appears to be real. After a short break of 46 days, he returns with recent form reading 12-2-4-3-5-21 — a second place and a couple of thirds buried in there, which at least suggests he is not entirely out of form.

What keeps this interesting is Hills himself, who has sent out 29 winners this season from his Lambourn yard and clearly retains belief in the horse. Back in 2023 he was seriously considering stepping Galeron up in distance, noting that he had finished fourth in the 2,000 Guineas and fifth in the Irish Guineas — big occasions — and kept finding more the further the race went. His owner Gary Robinson, meanwhile, remembers the Curragh win with obvious joy, describing himself and his wife as "elated" — the kind of moment that keeps owners in the sport. Galeron may not be a star, but he has clearly meant something to the people around him, and there is still a sense from Hills that the right race, at the right trip, has not quite been found yet.