Equilateral to Land Doncaster Day One Feature

Wednesday is the first of four days worth of action at Doncaster, with the whole meeting building up to the St Leger which takes place on Saturday and is the final classic of the season. The first day begins quite low key, with the Leger Legends taking centre stage. However, we do have the listed Scarbrough Stakes, a listed sprint for horses who are just short of being top class and it is in this race where the bet of the day on day one lies. The horse in question is the Charlie Hills trained Equilateral, a horse who has a couple of pieces of top class form behind good horses, and on those pieces of form there is little doubt that he is the best horse in this race.

After showing he was not quite up to being top class as a three year old, we have seen plenty from Equilateral this season to show that he can mix it with horses at this kind of level. He has ran five times, although hasn’t got his head in front just yet. However, if you excuse him a poor run last time out when he travelled to Ireland, the other four runs we have seen from him this season all look well in the context of this race. The most recent of those came at Royal Ascot when he ran in Group One company, finishing six lengths behind the now retired super sprinter Blue Point.

Elsewhere we have seen this horse finish a neck behind Mabs Cross at Newmarket, less than three lengths off Invincible Army and two lengths off the winner Keystroke in a Group Three. While he has not been putting winning performances on the board like some of his rivals have, what he has been achieving is something that the rest of this field would struggle to do. The key form rivals, El Astronaute and Tis Marvellous may have been able to match those performances once if at their best, but it is unlikely they would have been able to put up four performances in a row to match what Equilateral has done this season.

This drop in class to a listed contest looks to be exactly what he needs to get his head in front. He looks to be an in-between horse this season, one that can run well in Group races but not win, while being better than listed class. I am hopeful he shows us all that today when he runs in the listed Scarbrough Stakes at Doncaster on the opening day of the St Leger meeting.