The big winner (cue after-timing klaxon!) that reinforced the great weight myth and led me to this fabulously profitable punting system

They say weight stops trains, but in my experience it’s trespassers on the line, signalling failure or, in one disconcerting incident last month, a man attempting to assault LNER staff in the cafe car because they couldn’t serve him any food.

You’ll very often hear “perhaps the 6lb rise found him out” when, in my opinion, it’s much more than the 6lb rise that actually found him out. I’m not discounting the effect of weight entirely when it comes to assessing a horse’s chance or dissecting a result, but it’s mostly a convenient reason that oversimplifies the complexity of a single race in which there might have been literally dozens of other factors at play.

Horse A (let’s call him Prancing Brave) beats horse B (Big Eared Gerard) in a 12-runner handicap by two and a half lengths at Pontefract over a mile. The two horses meet again in three weeks. Prancing Brave is up 6lb. Are you seriously telling me that’s all you need to know to make a comfortable assumption that the second will narrowly turn around the form?