My A'Ali Baba

The breeding is worth a look. The father, A'Ali, was one of the quickest two-year-olds in Britain during his racing career, specialising in short, sharp sprints, and that speed tends to travel. The mother comes from the Red Ransom line, a family associated with winners who handle a variety of distances. Put those together and you have a horse that could easily inherit the raw pace of A'Ali — which would suit a two-year-old racing season built around quick, early races.

The trainer is David Evans, operating out of Pandy in Monmouthshire, and his yard has been in fine form — 37 winners already this season is a serious number, the kind that tells you horses are leaving that stable fit, sharp, and ready to run. Evans has built a reputation for getting young horses ready quickly, and a yard firing out winners at that rate tends to know what it is doing when it saddles a first-time runner. That is worth something, even when the horse itself is an unknown quantity.

The honest answer is that nobody outside the stable truly knows what My A'Ali Baba will do when the gates open. Debut horses are the biggest gamble in racing — brilliant in the morning, completely untested in the afternoon. But the ingredients are decent: fast bloodlines, a trainer in form, and the natural advantage that two-year-olds with sprint breeding can sometimes show up and win first time out before anyone has had a chance to work them out.