Quebecois

That win rate of 21% — roughly 1 in every 5 races — tells one story, but the detail beneath it tells another. On wet or muddy ground, he has won 2 of his 6 races, a 33% rate that suggests he genuinely thrives when conditions get testing. His trainer Paul Nicholls has also noticed something else: for whatever reason, Quebecois runs better when turning left-handed around a track. That kind of quirk sounds minor until you start planning a campaign around it, which is exactly what the team have done. Nicholls has spoken about him going well left-handed on decent ground, and a race at the Cheltenham Festival — the Ultima — has been the destination all along.

The partnership with jockey Harry Cobden has been one of the more productive relationships in the horse's career. The two have won 3 of their 10 races together, a 30% win rate that would be considered exceptional for almost any jockey-and-horse combination. Cobden knows this horse, and that matters at a big meeting.

What makes Quebecois genuinely interesting is the arc of the last few months. He has not won in his last six races, with his most recent victory coming at Ayr in April 2025, and his recent finishing positions — fourth, then a run of seconds and thirds — suggest a horse that is competitive without quite getting over the line. At Class 1 level, the very top tier of British racing, he has gone 0 from 5. That sounds like a ceiling, but Nicholls and the owner Max McNeill — who actually sponsors the race they are targeting — clearly believe a big day is still ahead of him. A recent run at Newbury settled his eligibility for the Ultima, and by all accounts the team have been steering toward that race for some time. For a horse that caught his own trainer "a bit by surprise" when he showed what he could do at Cheltenham's Trials day, a big occasion might be exactly where Quebecois saves his best for last.