Serious Operator

His partnership with Wadge is worth noting. The two have raced together 14 times and won 4 of them — that's winning roughly 1 in every 3.5 races together, which is the kind of number that tells you a rider and horse have genuinely figured each other out. Wadge's admission that he "probably got there too soon" in one recent run is the sort of honest self-awareness that tends to come from someone who knows a horse well enough to trust it the next time out.

Trained by the partnership of Lucinda Russell and Michael Scudamore, based in Milnathort in Perthshire, Serious Operator sits within a yard that has sent out 49 winners this season alone — a highly productive operation. Russell has noted he wasn't quite right last season, and the wet ground at Aintree didn't help, but she saw enough to believe a big-field race over a longer trip could suit him well. That kind of quiet optimism from a trainer who knows the horse better than anyone is worth paying attention to.

His biggest win came at Ayr in April 2023, a Class 2 race — one of the top tier of races in Britain — and he won at Newcastle as recently as November 2025, which shows he still has the ability to beat good horses. The recent form (a couple of blanks, a second, then a win, then a third) reads like a horse finding his way back to form rather than one on the slide. He raced just yesterday, which means he is very much in active training and very much in the mix. For a nine-year-old who picks his conditions, the story may not be over yet.