Godolphin's warship through choppy waters and it's full steam ahead

It won't make much of a song, nothing the milkman can whistle, but what a difference 65 days makes, 1,560 little hours. That's the time between Thunder Snow looking like a circus pony at the start of the Kentucky Derby and Thunder Snow looking like a high-class miler at the finish of the Prix Jean Prat.

The colt's transformation – his tour de farce at Churchill Downs is very much a blip in an otherwise sparkling career, to be fair – mirrors to a broad extent that of his owners, for during those 65 days Godolphin have begun to turn around their warship on the choppy seas of life and are now making full steam ahead just like old times.

In 2014, Godolphin won only one European Group 1. In 2015, the tally was only two. Last year they put four on the board, a steady increase redolent of that old puzzle involving a chessboard and some grains of rice, which if dragged out to its illogical conclusion would mean that in 2077 Godolphin could count on winning 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 Group 1s, which is coincidentally the number of Group 1s that would be staged if every British racecourse were successful in their pleas to the European Pattern Committee for upgrades.