Channel 4 is airing a documentary at 8pm about Shergar, the racehorse that vanished in 1983 after three men in balaclavas and carrying machine guns stole him from a stud. The programme revisits one of racing’s most notorious kidnappings and puts the focus back on the horse that was once the most valuable in the world.

Shergar was worth about £10m in 1983, and the theft quickly became a story far bigger than racing. The kidnappers demanded a ransom, and the case has long been linked to a period when the IRA needed funds. The film retells that night through people who knew the sport from the inside, including commentator Derek Thompson and journalist Lissa Oliver, giving the broadcast a direct line back to the era when the horse’s name was known far beyond the turf.

That is part of what keeps the story alive. Shergar was not just a champion; he was a symbol of the money, status and mythology wrapped around elite racing, which is why a kidnapping of this scale still lands as something close to impossible. One insider in the documentary puts it plainly: somebody came up with the idea that they were going to kidnap a racehorse.

What the programme does not resolve is the part that has shadowed the case for decades. The ransom demand is clear, and the wider backdrop of IRA financing is part of the telling, but there is no answer here on whether any money was paid or what became of Shergar after he was taken. That gap is now as much a part of the story as the theft itself.

So the broadcast offers not a conclusion, but a fresh reminder of why Shergar remains one of sport’s strangest unsolved tales. For viewers tuning in at 8pm, the headline is not only that the horse disappeared in 1983. It is that the mystery still has enough force to fill a prime-time documentary four decades later.