The horse, the race and the stage might all have been scripted as a way for the jockey to move on from one chapter to the next
The battle-hardened professional in Bryony Frost will approach the King George VI Chase on Sunday as just another race: in the zone, fence-to-fence, a brief time when nothing on the other side of the running rail can intrude. For everyone else, the sense that a page could be turned in the space of six minutes after the toughest two years of her career is difficult to ignore.
The horse, the race and the stage might all have been scripted as a way for Frost to move on from one chapter to the next. It was in the aftermath of her win on Frodon, a 20-1 outsider, in last year’s King George, that rumours emerged of issues between Frost and a weighing-room colleague. “It’s hard for me to chat about it,” she said on the TV cameras trained on her at the time, “because there are still things that need to be sorted out.”