The turf | 29 September 2016

There are few more compulsive reads in racing than the Kingsley Klarion, the in-house journal of Mark Johnston’s Middleham racing operation, which runs under the slightly ambiguous slogan ‘Always trying’. It is ambiguous not because anyone doubts that every Johnston runner is out on the racecourse striving to be first past the post but because the combatirobin ove Johnston is never short of an opinion, and sometimes those opinions have other senior figures in racing spitting feathers. Once of an opinion, he does not mind whose patience he tries.

Last Saturday Mark produced what was for me the training performance of the season when, in a stiff wind, his 25-1 shot The Last Lion won the Group One Juddmonte Middle Park Stakes, one of the key autumn indicators of next season’s likely stars. It was no fluke: The Last Lion won strictly on merit, leading all the way to beat the Gimcrack winner Blue Point.