All those preview nights; all those column inches and television opinions and now, the ground, if you please, is soft, writes Tony Stafford. And if the forecast I saw on BBC weather on Saturday is correct - I still look at it first even though you don’t get much worth having for your licence fee these days, ask Gary Lineker - it’s bound to get softer.
Day by day, hour by hour, the rain will intrude. The same precipitation that wilfully stayed away in the autumn and for much of the winter, then suddenly decided to turn up. Ironically, it materialised just when trainers of soft ground horses were barely going through the motions of training them, so sure had been the long-range prognostications of fast ground. Now, though, we can expect buckets of the stuff.
Only two weeks ago at a preview evening when good/good to soft was the undercurrent, we had to be aware that while the course officials would do their darndest to maintain it, Cheltenham and its far too efficient drainage would surely sort/rule that out. Beware running soft-ground horses on it had to be the message!
Now, though, the capricious UK weather has shown its full force. Nicky Richards planned a five-horse raid at Ayr the other day. On the wet west coast of Scotland in early March, the ground was fast and three of the quintet stayed home.
Yet here we are after a few rain showers and a couple of blankets of snow, and it’s shaping up like those days of yore when the Irish used to come over and relish the sight of hock-deep mud and jockeys twirling their whips like shillelaghs.
It’s March 14 tomorrow and already trainers I talk to regularly are avoiding risking winning novice chases with potential high-class prospects as we’re getting dangerously close to the late April cut-off point for season 2022-23.
Something needs to be done about that. Most of the top stables don’t really get going until October bringing in their top horses. Cheltenham in March is not just the Holy Grail, for many it’s the Only Grail and when you look at this week’s cards, that fact is driven home ever more forcibly. Equally, after Aintree next month, there’s not much left, either.
I thought I’d check up on Willie Mullins. He has declared 24 horses for tomorrow’s opening phase. He has 43 entered for Wednesday, 22 on Thursday and 27 on Friday. I’m guessing he’ll win eight races. Just a guess, though.
To business, Constitution Hill will not worry if the ground is fast, good, soft, heavy or under water. He’ll win as he likes and write another page in his and Nicky Henderson’s legend.
I mentioned shillelaghs earlier, advisably because it reminded me of one Cheltenham Festival meeting when the late and more than great John (Lord) Oaksey penned one of his most memorable outpourings.
And outpourings they were! It started something like this – I subbed it in the office that night and wish I’d kept it in my inside pocket for the 46 years that have elapsed since that awful day.
“Only two stands blew down at Cheltenham yesterday, the Irish only won four <I think> races and two of England’s greatest ever jumps horses, Bula’s and Lanzarote’s careers came to an untimely end.”
Both horses were trained in Lambourn by Fred Winter, the multiple champion jump jockey who progressed to even more fame and success as a trainer of elite racehorses and future trainers, among them Nicky Henderson and Oliver Sherwood.
Both horses were coming to the end of distinguished careers. Bula, winner of the Champion Hurdle in 1971 and 1972, won 32 more races over eight seasons until his fall at the fifth fence in the Two-Mile Champion Chase on that fateful day. He sustained torn shoulder muscles. For a while as he convalesced it was hoped he could be saved but after two months, one leg became almost totally paralysed and he was put down, aged 12, robbed of an honourable retirement.
The denouement was even more stark for Lanzarote. Selected to run in the Gold Cup, which was thought to be Bula’s target, Lanzarote was an early casualty, broke a leg and was destroyed. He, too, was a Champion Hurdle winner, in 1974.
Imagine the trauma for Winter, his staff and the horses’ owners. Both horses were regarded as superior champions of the breed. In the highly respected assessment of the Best Horses of the 20th Century, John Randall and Tony Morris rated Bula 5th best hurdler, only behind fellow champions Night Nurse, their number one, Persian War, Monksfield and Comedy Of Errors and ahead of Istabraq. Timeform put Lanzarote in their top ten hurdlers of all time.
One person who will have been as devastated as anyone that day – the future Lord Oaksey included – was Nicky Henderson. He was Winter’s number one assistant at the time of those twin tragedies and didn’t start his own stable until the following year.
Tomorrow he can be in a position after almost half a century to write a new page in National Hunt history by sending out Constitution Hill to usurp all those wonderful horses, names I grew up with just as he did.
Mullins, Henderson, Elliott, De Bromhead, Nicholls and the rest. They all wait for the good horse, but first need to land the big fish who will pay for the privilege of having horses in their elite and winning-most yards.
I wrote a few weeks ago about the Willie Mullins stranglehold on Friday’s Triumph Hurdle. Of seven in the field, he still has two geldings and five fillies confirmed among 17 six-day declarations.
Gala Marceau, who won the juvenile race at the Dublin Racing Festival when original favourite Lossiemouth suffered a troubled run, now vies for the top spot, and Blood Destiny is the only other in the line-up on offer at less than 16/1.
All five fillies were bought from France, presumably for massive money and all have found their way into high-octane ownership. I hope all seven run and fill the first seven places. They pay down to eighth after all, although should any of the ten walk-on performers intervene, that would represent a slight on the Mullins method. Just joking, Willie!
I digress. Fundamental at the time was Oaksey’s concern with animal and rider welfare – he was a major figurehead in the original organisation of the Injured Jockeys’ Fund. He also found the flogging of horses to get every ounce from them in the typically near-waterlogged ground of those pre-drainage (and less global-warming affected) days to be total anathema.
I would imagine he might find the latest toughened whip rules to his liking, although Mullins and other top trainers seem to think that Cheltenham might be spoilt with jockeys concentrating more on counting than riding horses to their best.
John Oaksey was a force for good, causes and, above all, writing. As the son of the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes trial, he could hardly have been anything else, never mind a wonderful colleague for many years. As they go up the hill for the first time tomorrow, his genial visage will slip briefly into the consciousness, before as he would wish it, thoughts turn quite rightly to the wonderful horses we are privileged to watch in action.
- TS
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