Today's hero

Today's hero could indeed be the Rae Guest-trained Miss Cato (or her trainer, come to that) who, as has been observed, has graduated in just over six months from contesting a midwinter seller on the Fibresand at Southwell to finishing fourth in the Grade One American Oaks in the sunshine of Hollywood Park.  You don't get much more rapid upward-mobility than that.  But I'll content myself with nominating the excellent Silvestre De Sousa, who bravely took the stand for a Racing Post Q&A session on Twitter today.  We're still waiting for the sadly-now-defunct @hugoshair, who turned out not to be the bloodstock agent Hugo Merry, to take the helm in this slot, but in the interim Silvestre did extremely well.

You will recall that Silvestre, who had seemed extremely happy with his lot, was seemingly offered the job riding for Sheikh Hamdan but apparently turned it down.  He was then offered what appeared to be the job as second jockey for Godolphin behind Frankie Dettori.  This he eventually accepted - and then about four days later it was announced that Mikael Barzalona had been appointed Godolphin's second jockey, leaving Silvestre as third jockey.  And there is a massive difference between second jockey and third jockey in any stable, as poor Silvestre is currently finding out.  Anyway, he's coped very well with all that, and he coped equally well with one question today which asked whether he thought that Barzalona would be champion jockey one day, and if he (Barzalona) really is the next Frankie Dettori.  Silvestre's answer was diplomacy personified ("I don't know - he has the potential but there's only one Frankie") but he coped even better when asked (no word of a lie): "Who would win a fight between a gorilla and a crocodile".  Amazingly he managed to avoid the obvious 'WTF?' reaction, and instead came out with, "Would it be in water or out of water???  I have no idea!".  Never mind being an understudy for Frankie within Godolphin - with diplomatic skills like that, Silvestre could be an understudy Simon Crisford!