Tarlac

He arrived at trainer Katie Scott's yard in Galashiels, in the Scottish Borders, as a castoff from a much grander world. He had previously been trained by Kevin Ryan and owned by Sheikh Obaid — one of the sport's most prominent owners — and came to Scott's smaller operation having picked up some habits that needed unpicking. Specifically, he'd been going around the track the wrong way, which in racing terms means he'd been running clockwise rather than the standard direction, and it took real work to straighten that out.

Once settled, he started to show something. A placed finish at Hamilton came first, and then on 29 May 2025 he won at Ripon — his one and only career victory to date. Since then, however, the results have been harder to read. His last six finishes read 7-7-8-5-6-7, which is a sequence of near-misses and also-rans. His most recent outing at Ayr came on very wet, muddy ground, and Scott points to that as a genuine excuse — Tarlac, it seems, is a horse who needs better conditions underfoot, and the heavy surface simply found him out physically. He was weak on it, plain and simple.

What gives Tarlac's story a forward-looking angle is how his trainer speaks about him. Scott's yard has sent out 17 winners this season, so this is not an operation that talks up horses that haven't earned it. The fact that she describes him as "a really nice horse" and says the team are genuinely excited about what the autumn might bring — the backend of the season, when competition thins out — suggests there may be more to come. At Class 5 level, which is the entry point of competitive racing in Britain, he has won 1 from 9 races (11%), and with the ground likely to dry up and firm conditions returning, the hope is that Tarlac at his best is still ahead of us.