September dawns with a frisson among the racing community. This month could elevate the sport to rare heights of popular awareness and workplace debate as a former champion jockey seeks to prove he can still cut it when the pressure is on. And there is also a comeback for Kieren Fallon.
What a strange world, in which racing stands to advance further in the public consciousness through a retired rider taking up ballroom dancing than through the barely credible return to race-riding of the most gifted and notorious jockey of his generation.
Yet to that vast couch society, their lives consumed by watching the famous, and not so famous, trying to be something they are not, there is no contest. Reality TV wins out over real-life soap every time.
Like it or not, Richard Dunwoody in sequins on Strictly Come Dancing will turn many more heads than the earthy drama of Fallon's final chance to be remembered more for the good and the great in his contrary act, than the bad and the ugly.
There are intriguing parallels. Fallon and Dunwoody are both tortured geniuses who could envisage no rewarding life after racing. Dunwoody was forced to retire by the medics and has spent years simulating the lost adrenalin rush with manufactured challenges. Fallon has regularly been pushed close to retirement by his own foolish hand, yet still he refuses to go away.
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Now here they are at contrasting crossroads. Is it demeaning that Dunwoody will enliven a motley troupe of supposedly celebrity contestants? Or is his appearance on a Saturday night primetime show a precious publicity gift for his old sport?
The questions about Fallon are more profound. Should we be celebrating the rubberball return of a man who has brought racing disreputable headlines so often? Should he be allowed back at all, without the internal disciplinary inquiries that faced others who stood in the Old Bailey dock alongside him two years ago?
There may be pangs of conscience on both fronts but they are easily suppressed. Fallon has done his time for drugs and has been found guilty of nothing in the murky areas of race-fixing and inside information. As for Dunwoody, if his unquenchable spirit of adventure has come to this, racing should just sit back and enjoy the reflected attention.
Both men will find things have changed in their new workplaces. “Strictly” has been losing its ratings war, just as racing has been losing its market share of the gambling pool.
Fallon last rode in Britain more than three years ago and he, too, will find an altered landscape. Prize money is down. Kempton's all-weather track, where he intends to ride on Friday evening, was not even open when his exile started. And there is a bright-eyed bunch of newcomers in the weighing-room, headed up by William Buick and Freddie Tylicki.
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The regulators of British racing have been so scrupulously fair to Fallon that one might almost conclude they shared the widespread view that Flat racing has been dull without him.
Fallon says he has changed, and appearances support him. What has not changed is his hunger for winners and an aptitude for work that has already convinced the training population to welcome him open-armed.
Will he prove past his best? Can the magic survive, after all he has been through? Racegoers and sports-watchers can scarcely wait to discover. Probably, though, the answer lies back in the dancing world. To many “Strictly” addicts, Bruce Forsyth still carries the show, at almost twice Fallon's age. Class has no substitute.