The fashion for wrapping horses in cotton wool for months before the Festival does not appear to work.
The victory of Holmwood Legend at last week’s Cheltenham Festival brought smiles to many faces and for various reasons. It was a career highlight for the popular 70-year-old trainer Pat Rodford, it was a 25-1 shocker to delight the bookmakers and, perhaps most important of all, it was one in the eye for the new fad of wrapping your best horses in cotton wool from early December.
Holmwood Legend was running for the eighth time in six months and had last been seen in public five days before, when winning at Sandown. Yes, it was only a handicap that he won at the Festival but it was as competitive as any race there. He beat 19 runners, many of them from high-profile yards, and he did so at the end of a busy campaign.
The 27 winners at Cheltenham last week had had their previous race an average of 55 days beforehand. If you remove from the calculation the aberrant Quevega, who once more duffed up inferior rivals in the Mares’ Hurdle, the average comes down to 45. Quevega aside, Big Buck’s and Chicago Grey were the winners who had been longest off the track, both returning after gaps of 78 days.
Several fancied horses turned up after longer absences and flopped. Cue Card (94 days), Time For Rupert (95) and Poquelin (96) were all unplaced favourites. Imperial Commander (118), Aegean Dawn (117) and Menorah (94) also disappointed their backers.
Doubtless each case has its own explanation and it would be facile to assert on the basis of this evidence alone that a three-month absence dramatically reduces a horse’s chance at Cheltenham. But it does not seem to be an advantage.
Paul Jones, author of the popular annual trends guide to the Festival, says that last year’s meeting threw up similar results, inasmuch as Quevega was the only winner who had not raced since Christmas. In relation to last week he noted that Captain Chris and Bostons Angel, winners of the two main novice chases, had been repeatedly tested in the best company this season.
Trainers are not, of course, in full control of a horse’s preparation. Imperial Commander and Time For Rupert would each have had another race before the Festival but for infections. Cheltenham Form Guide suggests races better than a rest
But the message to be drawn from last week is surely that fit horses should be raced, not saved for another day. A recent convert to that way of thinking appears to be Nick Williams, who opted to keep Diamond Harry at home after his Hennessy success on 27 November and was left to rue that reticence when the horse injured a ligament in early March.
The Festival has done wonderful things for the popularity of jump racing but it would be a pity if it dominated to the extent that races during the preceding 10 weeks became non‑events, denuded of significant talent. The preparation of certain horses this winter seemed to hint at just such a dark future, so fans of the sport should be delighted to learn that an attacking approach seems a more likely route to success and the participants need to learn that lesson.
Another route to success seems to be to fit your horse with ear plugs, as modelled by Hurricane Fly and Long Run last week. Other trainers may feel they have something to learn from Willie Mullins and Nicky Henderson and, since ear plugs are cheap, their use may spread quickly.
It is hard to be sure about their effectiveness but we can hardly measure that without knowing which horses are wearing them. Surely it must now be odds-on that ear plugs will have to be declared at some point, as is already done with blinkers, visors, tonguestraps and cheekpieces.
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This article titled “Cheltenham Gold Cup day – as it happened” was written by Tony Paley, Chris Cook, Steve Busfield, Barry Glendenning, Will Hayler, Greg Wood and Paul Hayward, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 18th March 2011 10.08 UTC
Nicky Henderson craves Cheltenham Gold Cup at end of troubled Festival
National Hunt racing has treated us to Red Rum overcoming Crisp, Bob Champion beating cancer to win the Grand National and Dawn Run seeing off the boys in a Gold Cup. Nicky Henderson has his own dark obstacle to surmount in the Festival’s defining race on Friday. Long Run’s bid is no longer a straightforward Corinthian tale.
In the saddle, yes. When Sam Waley-Cohen boards Long Run in this Gold Cup he will attempt to become the first amateur since Jim Wilson in 1981 to win chasing’s most illustrious prize. Waley-Cohen, 28, divides his time between running a dental services firm with 150 employees and galloping round England upsides the likes of Ruby Walsh and AP McCoy.
Long Run, the joint-favourite with Imperial Commander, is his father Robert’s horse. Their quest is a family affair, maintained in honour of Thomas Waley-Cohen, Sam’s brother, who succumbed to cancer at the age of 20. This story of enterprise and togetherness is from the top drawer of steeplechasing yarns. But Henderson, Long Run’s trainer, has his own reasons for wanting to break his Gold Cup duck, and they stem from a need to protect his reputation.
Henderson is the emotional, bustling, old school master of Seven Barrows in Lambourn who described himself as “shattered” when the defending champion, Binocular, had to be withdrawn from Tuesday’s Champion Hurdle after the stable were told he would test positive for a banned substance if he carried the JP McManus colours round Cheltenham in the most important race for hurdlers.
The fuss started when a stablemate of Binocular returned a positive post-race A-test for a steroid administered 18 days before the event. Conventional veterinary wisdom was that the substance would clear after eight days. Alarmed by the positive result, Henderson plumped for an elective test on Binocular and scratched the Champion Hurdle favourite when the British Horseracing Authority told him the horse would fail a post-race test if he turned up in the Cotswolds.
Henderson is a trainer to the royal family and has won more than £1m in prize money this season. But there is more to this episode than an establishment figure narrowly averting a scandal on day one of the Festival. Indignation persists over the failure by Henderson and the British Horseracing Authority to announce that Binocular would not be able to run. The horse’s elective test showed positive on Thursday – but the disclosure was delayed until Sunday morning.
Three years ago Henderson was fined £40,000 and banned from making race entries for three months after Moonlit Path, owned by the Queen, tested positive for tranexamic acid, a banned blood-clotting agent. The vet who injected the royal mare with the banned substance, James Main, was recently struck off.
Against this background Long Run’s trainer has endured a miserable Festival, despite starting the week joint-favourite to send out the most winners, a title he has won eight times. With 37 Festival victories, he started the week only three behind Fulke Walwyn’s all-time record of 40, and sent a strong team headed by the country’s best young chaser, Long Run, who halted Kauto Star’s quest for a fifth consecutive King George at Kempton. Henderson declines to discuss these controversies. He is increasingly sensitive about the use of “doping” or “dope tests” in relation to incidents he regards as accidents or oversights. And he was known to be irritated when his runners on Tuesday were hauled off for post-race tests. His Cheltenham winners have dried up just when he needed a dose of cheer to lift the ill-feeling over how he delayed the Binocular announcement and the doubts about veterinary procedures at his yard.
So Long Run brings a darker hue of melodrama to the Gold Cup, with many punters pointing out that had a less powerful operation run into the kind of difficulties the Henderson yard encountered last week then condemnation would have been more stinging. There is no rush to cast aspersions in relation to the way Binocular’s Champions Hurdle preparation was mismanaged. But plenty feel there are unanswered questions and wonder how so many errors came to be made.
The intrepid Waley-Cohen family are entitled to separate themselves from this hullabaloo. Their mission retains its purity. They bought Long Run because he was a “spectacular” specimen, to quote Sam, and because they owned others from his family tree. In the King George, his jockey feels, horse and rider proved they belong on this exalted stage. But the Gold Cup is another level up. To see Waley-Cohen matching strides with Walsh, McCoy and co will be the most compelling amateur-professional clash since Mr J Wilson booted home Little Owl.
Mr S Waley-Cohen – mountaineer, helicopter pilot and motorbike rider – brings a thrilling edge to his hobby. “What you’re trying to do is take a horse to the edge of what it’s capable of,” he says. “The second you step back into the safety zone and say: ‘I can’t get it wrong, I can’t get it wrong,’ you’re not going to win. There’s an element of ‘throw your heart over it’ to persuade the horse about what you’re trying to do. And if it doesn’t work – boom!”
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