Sent to Cologne: Goliath's fate shows how racing treats quality geldings - and it's a self-harming blunder

According to the old idiom, unwanted people are "sent to Coventry", which is to say ostracised and shut out from polite society. There's a theory that it derives from civil war days, when captured royalists would be imprisoned at Coventry, a stronghold of the parliamentarian side.

It looks like we have just invented a modern version in racing: to be sent to Cologne. That's where Goliath the gelding will have his next run. The Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe would be by a wide margin the most logical target for a middle-distance four-year-old like him but, as you are probably aware by now, he is barred from the race because of the pea-shelling operation he underwent some time ago.

Goliath, you'll recall, was the handsome beast who ran away with Ascot's King George six weeks ago. Previously unheralded, he was obviously going to win from the moment Christophe Soumillon eased him out from behind the leaders. Against the likes of Bluestocking, Rebel's Romance and Auguste Rodin, he hacked up.