We watched the next race from Wetherby, a three-mile novice hurdle with six runners. Three miles was just over two complete circuits of the anticlockwise course, so the start was just to the left of the winning post as the camera viewed it from the grandstand.

All six jumped off at a very sensible steady pace—three miles was a long way for novices in heavy going, and they also had to jump twelve flights of hurdles, three down the back and three in the home straight on each circuit.

Bucks Fizzy, the three-to-one favourite, took a keen hold early on but was held up to the rear of the field as the sextet completed the first circuit at no great pace. Down the back for the second time, the jockey nudged him along to track closer to the leaders, but the horse jumped badly to the right over the fourth last, and, in spite of the apparent best endeavours of the jockey, he weakened quickly on the turn for home—so much so, in fact, that he became tailed off and was pulled up before the last.

The race was won by a five-to-one shot.

Six minutes of unremarkable racing—yet another favourite had not won, but nothing about the race made me particularly suspicious.

As far as I could tell, the jockey had satisfied Rule F(37) to the letter—he had asked the horse for a timely, real and substantial effort, and had taken all other reasonable and permissible measures to ensure the horse was given the full opportunity to achieve its best possible position.

Bucks Fizzy had simply not been fast enough on this day.

‘Another losing favourite,’ I said finally into Marcus’s silence, perhaps fishing for a response.

‘Happens all the time,’ he said. ‘It’s a strange sport, really, from a jockey’s point of view. Even the best of us lose far more races than we win. You just have to get used to it.’

It was true. A. P. McCoy, without question the most successful jump jockey in the history of the sport, won over four thousand races during his riding career, but he also lost more than thirteen thousand others, with at least a thousand of those ending up with him hitting the turf.

Would Usain Bolt be considered the greatest 100-metre sprinter of all time if he had lost more than three-quarters of the races he had run in? Even the tennis greats, Nadal, Federer and Djokovic, all of them playing in the same era, have each won more than two-thirds of the tournament finals they’ve played in, to say nothing of their earlier-round victories to get to the final in the first place.

Only in horse racing do even the very best have to get used to losing far more often than they win.