Welcome to the house of fun - now let's get the party started with a Gosden special at Sandown

It genuinely fills me with great pride to say that I will be writing this column for the entirety of the 2026 Flat season, in the year that the Racing Post turned 40. 

I have a photo on my Facebook of a friend and I grinning on either side of Alastair Down at Longchamp, taken during the year of Hurricane Run or Rail Link. The great man was on his way back to the press room with some French cigarettes and kindly stopped to give a thumbs-up and a smile before heading off and if you’d told that fresh-faced journalism graduate that one day he’d have his own grinning byline, he’d have been thrilled to bits.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then but I still get a tingle in my gut when the Flat season rolls around. Part of that is sheer relief at seeing blue sky for more than five minutes at a time, but the rest is the knowledge that we stand on the cusp of another year of blistering juveniles, Classic duels and mind-boggling handicaps.