Moon d'Orange

That Cheltenham win in Class 1 company — the highest grade of race in Britain — came with a degree of drama attached. Jockey Callum Pritchard had the horse fitted with first-time visors and gave him a quiet lead, letting him find his rhythm rather than forcing the pace. The horse jumped and travelled like a different animal. Trainer Sean Bowen described what happened next: three or four strides before the final fence, Moon d'Orange pricked his ears — a sign a horse is distracted — and made a bad mistake on landing. Pritchard stayed on, and the horse's toughness carried him over the line. "He'd have won well," Bowen said afterwards. That is the kind of detail that sticks with racing people.

The key lesson the team appears to have taken from that day is not just the blinkers, but the approach: give this horse daylight and don't hassle him early, and he does the job himself. McConnell confirmed a few weeks later that they felt they had finally found the way to ride him — and in racing, that kind of breakthrough with an older horse is genuinely rare. A yard that has sent out 38 winners this season is not short of horses to focus on, which makes the fact that they are still developing Moon d'Orange at age 8 a small but telling sign of belief.

The shadow over all of this is time. That Cheltenham win was 16 months ago now, and the last 6 races have produced nothing better than a third place. His most regular jockey, Mr B W Harvey, has ridden him 10 times and won once together — the same 1-in-10 rate as the overall career. Moon d'Orange raced just yesterday, so he is clearly still active and still being asked the question. Whether the Cheltenham performance was a glimpse of what this horse can be, or a high point that proves hard to repeat, is the interesting thing left to find out.