Megaphone

Both wins have come at Class 5 level, which is the bread-and-butter end of the sport, and that's where he's been most comfortable. At that level, he's actually a different proposition — winning 2 from 8 races, or 1 in every 4, which is a solid return. The problem is that when he steps up in class or things don't fall his way, he tends to disappear. His last six runs read 11-4-3-9-9-11, meaning two finishes buried in the field bookending a brief spell of better form in the middle. He hasn't won since Wolverhampton in February 2025 — 15 months ago now — and he raced just yesterday, so he's clearly being kept busy without quite rediscovering that winning feeling.

Scott Dixon, who trains him from a yard in Rolleston, Nottinghamshire, has sent out 33 winners this season — a yard clearly in decent form — and Dixon has been thinking carefully about where Megaphone fits next. After a run at Wolverhampton that Dixon himself admitted was a little disappointing, the plan is to try him over six furlongs and see how he responds to turf racing when the season gets properly underway. That switch in surface and trip could matter. Some horses simply come alive on grass after spending the winter on the artificial all-weather tracks, and Dixon is clearly hopeful this is one of them.

There's also a potentially ambitious target on the horizon. Dixon mentioned the possibility of targeting a £150,000 race on All-Weather Finals day — a serious prize for a horse operating at this level. Whether Megaphone has the class to compete in that kind of company remains to be seen, but the fact the team are even considering it suggests they believe there's more in the tank than the recent form figures show. That's the thing about horses like this — two wins and a handful of places from 20 races can look modest on paper, but every trainer with a horse like Megaphone thinks the breakthrough might be one good decision away.