Myretown

The bare numbers tell one story: 4 wins and 5 places from 17 races, which works out to winning roughly 1 in every 4 races he enters. But context matters here. Myretown only made his racing debut relatively recently, and Russell was candid after Cheltenham that he barely qualified for the race on paper — in most years his ranking would not have earned him a place in the field at all. The fact that he won it, and won it impressively, suggests the numbers are only just beginning to reflect what he is capable of. He is lightly raced for a 9-year-old, which is actually unusual and potentially exciting — there may be more to come from a horse still finding himself.

His relationship with Derek Fox, his regular jockey, looks like a genuine partnership worth watching. Fox has been aboard for 12 of his races and they have won 3 of them together — that is 1 win in every 4 outings as a pair, which mirrors the horse's overall record and suggests real continuity and trust between horse and rider. His record at Kelso is even sharper: 2 wins from just 3 races there, a track where he clearly feels at home.

Russell has been refreshingly honest about where Myretown sits in the pecking order. He is not a Gold Cup horse, she says — but Grand Nationals are very much on the agenda, and for a horse who jumps with real exuberance and is still learning his craft, that is a serious ambition. The plan is to start him in the Coral Gold Cup at Newbury, with a couple of racecourse gallops to prepare him. He has not won in his last six races, and that run has to end somewhere. Given what he did at Cheltenham, that somewhere could be anywhere.