Sara Bradstock has admitted the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Coneygree was left out of the entries for the King George VI Chase at Kempton in December by mistake but is not ruling out supplementing the horse for the Boxing Day highlight.
The dual King George winner Silviniaco Conti and Irish challengers Vautour and Don Cossack were among the entries for the race when revealed on Wednesday, but Coneygree was not on the list and Bradstock, wife and assistant to trainer Mark, has revealed his omission was down to an error on her husband’s part.
Bradstock said: “I’m afraid we can’t blame anyone but ourselves. Mark was doing the computer entries last week and I think he must have pushed the wrong button. As I keep telling people, we’re good with horses, but not so good at IT!”
Coneygree is due to reappear in the Future Stars Chase at Sandown on Sunday, a prep race before runnning in the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury on 28 November.
Supplementing the eight-year-old to the King George field, which will cost sonnections £10,000, will be discussed after that, but Bradstock said conditions would need to be testing.
“As always we’ll do what’s best by the horse. He’ll run on Sunday and then, all going well, he’ll go to the Hennessy and then if we felt supplementing for the King George was the right thing to do, we’ll do it,” she said.
“It might not matter as if we’re going to take on horses like Vautour, I think we’d want to do it when there is more of an emphasis on stamina. If it came up good ground at Kempton, we probably wouldn’t go anyway, but if it’s heavy and we thought it was right we could still do it.
“On the other hand we might look at the Lexus [Leopardstown, 28 December] instead, or we might even be better giving him more time and looking at the Cotswold Chase at Cheltenham [30 January], so there are alternatives.”
The British Horseracing Authority was not minded to make allowances, even for a Cheltenham Gold Cup winner. “Whilst we sympathise with the error made, this is not something that can be waived,” said the BHA spokeswoman, Tessa Smyth. “This is a mistake that can, and has, happened to other trainers and it is not a precedent we are able to set in the interest of fairness to all the other competitors.”
This is not the first computer blunder to trouble Coneygree’s connections. When he was initially declared for the Gold Cup in March, racing’s official entry system showed the low-profile jockey Joe Cornwall as having been booked, rather than Nico de Boinville, who had been winning on the horse.
The Bradstocks expressed their horror at the time and persuaded racing’s administrators to change the booking to De Boinville. Sara Bradstock said on Thursday that no reason had yet emerged for what went wrong on that occasion, though she is fearful that their computer entry system may have been hacked.
