Silvan Star looks set to stay in training to go for bigger and better things next season after the way she won the Final Fling Stakes at Kenilworth on Saturday.

This was even more impressive than the Ladies Mile with Richard Fourie striking for home two furlongs out and afterwards confirming that he never had a moment’s doubt.

He added: “She’s got stronger and stronger, and she has a very good kick. She might not be much to look at but when you get on her you know she’s got substance.”

This was Fourie’s first Final Fling but the fourth in 16 years for Glen Kotzen and the way the Ascot-bred Silvano filly did it filled part-owner Peter de Beyer with big time optimism.

“You could say that she has now done enough to go to stud but I think it would be worth keeping her in training for another year,” he reasoned. “It certainly would be if she could win a Group 1 or a Group 2, and she is improving all the time.

“I reckon she has come on another 5lb here. In the Ladies Mile some of the others had excuses but she definitely put them all to bed this time. I will speak to Georgina Jaffee when she returns from overseas.”

Connections of those put to bed had varying reports. Chris Snaith (A Time To Dream, beaten two and a half lengths into second) said: “It was just too far for our filly. She doesn’t get the 1 800m.”

Grant van Niekerk, half a length further back on 13-10 favourite Ngaga, added: “Mine doesn’t turn it on instantly and she would enjoy the longer straight.”

Mike Robinson, trainer of 8-1 chance Goodtime Gal who came from last to finish fourth, said: “She ran on nicely but she got too far back and had too much to do.”

It was shortly after he returned from the Dubai Carnival that Bernard Fayd’Herbe and Snaith Racing agreed that he should become the stable’s first jockey once more. There is no retainer involved, just an agreement, in Chris Snaith’s words, that: “Bernard has first call on us and we have first call on him.”

The latest renewal of the old firm partnership had its most prolific day yet with four of the first six winners, and surely the most intriguing of the quartet was Turbulent Air – not because he gave weight all round in the mile handicap but because of what might have been.

“We had him planned for the July with a light weight and in the Winter Series I thought he would beat African Night Sky,” Snaith snr revealed. “However we then found that he had a kissing spine where the saddle goes. When the weight is on, and at a gallop, two of the bones touch and that hurts.”

One solution would have been to operate but, as is so often the case with human back surgery, such operations have a tendency to be only partially successful – and a racehorse has to be able to function at 100% capacity to be any good – “So what we are doing is playing around with different saddles to take the weight off that part of his back.”

Greg Ennion is also under the weather – fortunately in his case the problem is nothing more serious than ‘flu – and the back-in-form Anthony Andrews provided a better tonic than anything the doctors could prescribe by leading from halfway on Samsara in the Racing Association Maiden.

By Michael Clower