Cachet

For weeks before the Guineas meeting there will have been talk about the ante-post favourites, the big stables, the rich and famous owners. There will have been acres of press about the betting markets and the numbers and every single journalist will have tried to squeeze some clue out of the trainers, who don't want to give any clues. In some strange way, the horse can get lost in all this. I mean the horse in general--not a single Classic contender, but all the horses, the roughly 2,500 Thoroughbreds who...

The first Classics of the year are in the book: four in total, in Britain and Italy. Charlie Appleby sends out major winners with such metronomic regularity that it is easy to forget that there was a time when the Godolphin blue silks were a scarcity in Classic fields.  Having gone so close in last year's 2000 Guineas with Master Of The Seas (Ire) (Dubawi {Ire}), who was narrowly denied by the Jim Bolger-trained Poetic Flare (Ire) (Dawn Approach {Ire}), Appleby left nothing to chance this year when aiming both...

It is hard to ignore George Boughey at the moment. In only his second full season with a training licence, the 29-year-old is seventh in the British trainers' list by number of winners on 44 for the season. Most impressive of all is his strike-rate of 28%. Of trainers to have had more than 100 runners, only Charlie Appleby ranks higher on 30%, for his 36 winners. But Boughey's most pleasing moment of the season so far came not from a winner but through the superbly gritty run of his...