The turf | 19 July 2018

For Coleridge, ‘…the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us’. Not in racing it isn’t. However sharp the instincts of bright young apprentices on the way up, however exciting the pace shown by a novice horse on the home gallops, there is simply no substitute for racecourse experience. Odd, then, that English trainers have mostly been slow to make use of one of the world’s most battle-hardened front-line jockeys, who has chosen this season to base himself in Britain.

Gérald Mossé, whose strong Gallic features and courteous charm would never have him taken for anything but a Frenchman, now has a home in Newmarket and on the July course earlier this month he rode a double to catch any racing man’s eye. On Ed Walker’s Royal Intervention he showed perfect judgment of pace, leading all the way to take the Listed Betway Empress Fillies’ Stakes by four lengths.