Horse-racing has made a triumphant return

Horse racing, it turns out, wasn’t the first sport back in post-lockdown action: that distinction went to pigeon racing when some 4,400 birds took to the air and raced from Kettering to Barnsley. Nor did the first Classic, the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket, provide the hoped-for tonic headlines about a new super-horse to succeed the great Frankel. Pinatubo, a scintillating winner of all his six races as a juvenile and the highest-rated two-year-old since 1994, ran a perfectly respectable race to finish third, but the high hopes that the hot favourite was going to prove to be something truly special were dashed. It seems that the bigger, rangier types caught up with Godolphin’s compact little star over the winter. Indeed the virus-inspired month’s delay in staging the 2,000 may have helped them to do so.

But almost everything else about the 2,000 Guineas result was a massive positive. We cannot for the moment have our Hen and Terry moments with Best Mate’s trainer and her husband locked in a slo-mo passionate embrace over his third Gold Cup success, or the whooping, jumping, back-slapping exhilaration of successful syndicates.