Velvet Whisper

Those two wins came in quick succession last autumn. The first arrived at Nottingham on 23 October 2025, followed by a second at Musselburgh less than two weeks later on 5 November. Back-to-back wins like that are worth noting — horses that find a bit of form and press on with it are often in the best shape of their lives, and Velvet Whisper clearly found something during that spell. Since then, though, it has been a tougher story. The recent form reads 8-8-1-1-2-6 from most recent backwards, which means those two wins are now sitting six months in the past, with a pair of eighth-place finishes since. Getting back to that November form is the question the team at Middleham will be trying to answer.

That team is Edward Bethell's yard in North Yorkshire, and it is worth knowing what kind of operation that is. Sixty-two winners in a single season is a serious number — this is not a small stable having a quiet year. Bethell is a trainer who clearly knows how to have horses ready to win, which gives Velvet Whisper a reasonable platform to work from. The horse raced just yesterday, so it is very much in the thick of things at the moment.

Where it tends to line up is at Class 5 level — the bread-and-butter end of British racing, not the glamour events but the races that fill out a card at every track in the country. At that level, Velvet Whisper has won just 1 from 8, or roughly 1 in every 8 races, which is modest. The two recent eighths suggest it is not quite firing at the moment. But a horse trained by someone sending out 62 winners a season, with proven ability to win back-to-back when the conditions are right, is never entirely out of the conversation. The form from last November is in there somewhere — it just needs to come back out.