'No matter how tough it is we get up and we do it' - meet the South African changing perceptions in Newmarket

Dylan Cunha must have been considered little more than a curiosity when he took out a licence in Newmarket last season. A South African former airline pilot, out of the training game for a decade, playing around with three cheap horses? 'Seems a nice guy,' would be a likely verdict from the morning chats among his peers on the Heath, with the tacit understanding that he probably wasn’t someone to worry about too much.

Opinion on the personality of an open, focused man who seems to stay happily in his own lane should not have changed much in the course of a year. Now that two of that initial trio are becoming, at the very least, Saturday-type handicappers, and that they have been joined by another 25 or so more horses, a few more heads might have been turned.

Cunha has been in town since late 2020 after a dramatic change in his circumstances. He lost his job flying around Africa with Covid literally grounding the industry and, with some family in Britain and his window to move on a Portuguese passport closing through the finalisation of Brexit, it was time to go.