Yes, it's the spluttery sound that every trainer least wants to hear in the buildup to a major meeting, but the news that coughing has reached the yard of the champion trainer Paul Nicholls need not ruin his chances at the Cheltenham Festival in three weeks.
Never slow to gain some capital from a racing news story, the bookmakers have stirred the pot by pushing out the odds of Paul Nicholls to be the leading trainer at the meeting, promoting Willie Mullins and Nicky Henderson ahead of him in the betting.
But although having "the cough" in the yard can prove a disruptive influence as horses need to be moved around and isolated, treated with antibiotics or have their usual work patterns changed, there are few racing stables anywhere in the world that can say at any given point in time that they are cough-free.
"In my opinion we all have some virus, some of the time," said Philip Hobbs on Tuesday, one of the trainers likely to take the greatest advantage if Nicholls' runners are detrimentally affected over a period of more than a few days. Hobbs described the opening pages of Tuesday's Racing Post newspaper in which the word cough can scarcely have appeared so frequently before as "scaremongering".
"It's just a matter of working round it and not allowing the contamination to spread as much as you can," he said.
Another trainer, Colin Tizzard, could hardly have his team in better form having sent out five winners on Saturday, yet revealed that he too was at present afflicted.
"We've got some with a cough right now," he said. "It just happens. If you have 50 or 60 people in a room, there's always some with a cough. It's not life-threatening, is it?"
Horses cough for a variety of reasons, but the underlying cause is usually a viral infection, a bacterial infection or an allergy.
A bacterial infection is usually treated with antibiotics, which have no withdrawal period, and a horse who is only coughing a few times a day can still be cantered as usual.
Nicholls has a number of satellite stables which he can use as isolation barns if he is confident that the infection has not spread beyond certain horses. He will also have access to some of the finest vets in the country to help him take these decisions.
If there is a more underlying problem in the yard, it may require more complex treatment. After suffering repeated difficulties with coughs and colds in his yard, Ferdy Murphy brought in a team of professional steam cleaners who cleaned out every scrap of material in the yard and sterilised every surface. They now visit the yard twice a year to repeat the process. Sir Michael Stoute reportedly took the same action at the end of a disappointing year in 2011.
But the strong likelihood is that Nicholls will work round the problem and the vast majority of his runners will make it to Cheltenham in rude health for the start of the Festival.
Rather than a reaction to a genuine concern among most punters, the firms who have been chiselling down prices on the likes of Oscar Whisky and Long Run – horses set to take on Nicholls-trained hotpots at the Festival – are simply managing their markets.
The decision to cancel Wednesday's scheduled media day, an occasion which Nicholls admits he looks forward to as it gives him the chance to "get all the interviews done so I can concentrate on getting the horses right", was an entirely understandable move. The greater the number of unnecessary bodies traipsing about the place, the greater the prospect of further spread of infection.
Some of Nicholls' colleagues will be turning white at the thought of showing a similar degree of openness with the press over exactly which of their horses are currently under the weather. Only a few generations ago, a journalist attempting to gather similar information from a stable might have ended up with a flea in his ear rather than a few helpful paragraphs of explanation.
To some extent his hand may have been forced by having to explain the cancellation of his rapidly impending date with the media, but Nicholls still deserves considerable credit for telling it as it is in his column on the Betfair website.
It can only be hoped that his openness over the situation, particularly if there is important news to relay, continues over the days and weeks ahead – the loss of such welcome candour would be the greatest casualty of all.
