Prends Garde A Toi

The seven-year-old has been around long enough to know the job. With 2 wins and 5 places from 16 races, roughly 1 in every 8 has ended in a victory, and the horse has hit the frame nearly half the time overall. That is a horse who keeps finding a way to be competitive even when the winner's enclosure stays out of reach. The recent form figures tell an interesting story too — a win, two fourth-place finishes, and a few blanks either side. Not flashy, but there is life in there.

The stable behind the horse is anything but modest. Gordon Elliott's yard at Longwood in County Meath has sent out 209 winners this season alone — that is a factory-scale operation, one of the most powerful in Irish racing. When a horse comes out of Elliott's yard, it has been prepared by a team that knows exactly what it is doing. The fact that Prends Garde A Toi raced just one day ago suggests the yard — sorry, the team — are keeping this horse busy and in a good rhythm.

The Naas win in December 2025, coming more than a year after the first, is the detail worth holding onto. Winning once can be a fluke. Winning twice, at different tracks, separated by months, suggests a horse that has genuinely worked out how to do it. Whether there is more to come at seven years old is the open question, but a horse racing this frequently, trained this well, and capable of winning at a track as competitive as Naas is one worth keeping an eye on.