Snapius

Owen bought Snapius for a bargain £2,500, and for a while the horse was going nowhere in particular on the flat. The breakthrough came when the yard switched him to hurdles, and something clicked. A win before Christmas at Lingfield was followed by another convincing victory at Huntingdon as recently as eight weeks ago — so this is a horse currently in form, not one living off past glories. Owen was candid after Huntingdon that jockey Tom Bellamy, borrowed from a positive experience with another of Owen's flat horses at the same track, gave Snapius the kind of intelligent, confident ride the horse needed. He enjoyed the ground that day and won well.

On normal ground, Snapius has won 2 from 10 races — a 20% win rate, or roughly 1 in every 5. That is a meaningful jump from his overall numbers and tells you something real: get him on decent ground and he becomes a different proposition. His trainer has also noted he is not a horse for wet, muddy conditions — after a race in Cork on heavy ground, Owen acknowledged Snapius would have hated it, and that even finishing where he did took a fine ride to manage. There is no point running him in the mud.

His recent form reads second, fourth, first, a blank run, second, seventh — and with a race just yesterday, he remains active and busy. His most frequent jockey, Ben Bromley, has yet to get him into the winner's enclosure across seven rides together. The plan, according to Owen, is to keep mixing flat races and hurdles through the summer, which is an unusual and slightly adventurous approach, but then Snapius has always been an unconventional project. For a £2,500 purchase who has found a way to keep winning at seven years old, that feels entirely appropriate.