Teddy Blue

Trainer Harry Derham, based at Upper Lambourn in Berkshire — a yard that has sent out 57 winners this season — is refreshingly candid about how long it took him to understand this horse. By his own account, he spent the better part of a year training Teddy Blue entirely the wrong way, treating him like a normal horse when the reality is quite different. The breakthrough came when Derham stopped trying to impose structure and started working around his quirks instead — less conventional training, more following other horses rather than leading pieces of work, and a general policy of trusting the horse rather than forcing the issue. The result was a Class 1 win at Ascot in November 2025. Derham's assessment after that race was that Teddy Blue could have another stone in hand — or none at all. With this horse, you genuinely cannot tell.

The Kempton Park angle adds another layer. Teddy Blue has won 2 of his 5 races there, making it his most productive track by far, and his most recent win came at Kempton just six weeks ago. Jockey Paul O'Brien, who partners him most often and has won 2 of their 10 races together, described the experience at Kempton as unlike anything he had encountered — convinced at various points during the race that the horse was going too fast, then not going at all, then overreaching himself, before Teddy Blue simply decided, rounding the home bend, that now was the moment. Derham noted he had done the exact same thing there the year before. Even the morning before that race, his regular rider Rebecca couldn't get him to walk down the gallop. He simply refused.

What makes Teddy Blue genuinely compelling is that none of this reads like a horse in decline or in form by accident. He is currently active, raced just yesterday, and sits in the middle of a sequence that includes a third-place finish at the top level. He's his own man, as Derham puts it — and when he decides to race, he's very good indeed.