Cambridge, meet your first professor of racing lore

Watching the contestants parade at Epsom for this year’s Oaks, I remembered the great D. Wayne Lukas’s pronouncement on selecting fillies: ‘She should have a head like a princess, a butt like a washerwoman and walk like a hooker.’ The John Gosden-trained Taghrooda, listed a month earlier as the first of our Twelve to Follow this season, ticked all those boxes. I doubled my bet and cheered her home nearly four lengths clear of the biggest Oaks field in 40 years.

Sheikh Hamdan al Maktoum, an owner who gives much to the sport, has had a lean few years and it was good to see another Classic success for his blue and white colours. Even better on his first Oaks ride was the first Classic success for the modest, hard-working Paul Hanagan, the former champion jockey who uprooted his family from Yorkshire when invited to succeed Richard Hills as Sheikh Hamdan’s No.