Lariat

The numbers are honest about where this horse sits. One win from 56 races is a win rate of just 2%, roughly one in every 56 attempts. Even at its best distance — somewhere between a mile and six furlongs and two miles, where it has raced 28 times — it has managed just that single win, which works out to 1 in every 28 races at the trips that suit it most. The last six runs have returned a non-completion and finishes of ninth, seventh, ninth, fifth, and sixth. Nothing alarming, nothing that suggests the wheels have come off, but nothing to set pulses racing either.

Adam Caffrey has ridden Lariat twelve times without a win between them, a partnership that has been consistent if not exactly fruitful. The horse is trained by Liam P Cusack, whose yard in Mountrath, Co Laois has sent out three winners this season — so the operation is clearly capable of winning races. What Lariat brings to the string is less about glory and more about reliability: it places, it competes, it keeps turning up. Fourteen placed finishes from 56 races tells you this is a horse that is nearly always doing something right, just rarely quite enough.

The one moment in the spotlight came at Bellewstown, a track on the east coast of Ireland that stages racing in the summer. Whatever clicked that April day in 2022 has not quite clicked since, but Lariat keeps lining up. At ten years old, still active, still competing at a reasonable level — that in itself is a kind of achievement. Not every story ends with a trophy.