Coneygree, last season’s Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, “schooled brilliantly” and “appears to be completely focused” for his return to action at Sandown this weekend, Sara Bradstock, the wife of the eight-year-old’s trainer Mark, said on Friday afternoon. “It’s one of the things about him,” Bradstock added. “He wants to go racing. Nothing else matters.”
And when Coneygree goes racing over fences, as he showed in four starts over them last year, he comes home a winner. He was the first novice to run in the Gold Cup for nine years when he lined up at Cheltenham in March and the first for 41 years to win as his unrelenting gallop and bold, front-running style took the field apart. The Future Stars Intermediate Chase at Sandown on Sunday might seem an unlikely place for a proven champion to start his campaign but it should put an edge on his fitness before the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury later this month.
“People have said to me that they will close that loophole of a Gold Cup winner being allowed into an intermediate chase. Everyone went on that he shouldn’t run in the Gold Cup because he was a novice. To me that was all a load of nonsense because he didn’t know that he was a novice.
“But what it did mean is that you go into your second year of chasing and, if we hadn’t found this race, we would have to go in against the top guys. So that’s what’s really nice about this – to be able to have a race that, fingers firmly crossed, will be a nice confidence booster. It would have been very hard to come back after only four chase starts and race straight away in the Hennessy or something.”
The Bradstocks have had eight months to get used to the idea of having a Gold Cup winner in their small yard near Wantage and also to their own new-found status as folk heroes with a big, old-fashioned steeplechaser who are sticking it to The Man. Or rather, men like Willie Mullins and Paul Nicholls, whose strength in depth and purchasing power has all but bludgeoned the winter game into submission.
“Having a Gold Cup horse in the yard doesn’t make any difference to me because I want all of them to be able to run to their very best and that’s what we do, try to make sure that we turn every corner and don’t leave anything untouched,” Sara Bradstock says. “It’s obviously a bit more of a worry and I ride him all the time, so every step he takes I worry about but he’s in good nick.
“Someone rightly said that Willie Mullins brought more horses to Cheltenham [in March] than we’ve got in the yard and each one of those would have been bought for more than all of ours together. So, the British love the underdog, don’t they?
“[But] the sad thing is that one would have hoped it would be a real shot in the arm for small trainers and that owners would realise that, rather than have their horses in the back yard of a big trainer, we can all do it and horses can get looked after better in a smaller yard. But it doesn’t make any difference. We haven’t got any more horses.”
Coneygree’s career has not gone entirely to plan since he returned from a long lay-off at the start of last season. He was withdrawn from his intended reappearance at Plumpton last November on the orders of the racecourse vet, much to the annoyance of his trainer, while a hacker managed to jock off his regular rider Nico de Boinville on racing’s main database before the Gold Cup, briefly replacing him with a little-known journeyman, Joe Cornwall.
Another “computer glitch” this week meant that Coneygree’s name did not appear among the entries for the King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day, a race for which he could have been a leading contender after his 40-length romp in a Grade One event over the same course and distance last year. The unexpected seems to follow Coneygree around, which adds to his appeal for racegoers in an era of routine victories for the most powerful National Hunt yards.
“We had a bit of a glitch with the entries but we would go there if the ground was soft and he was back from the Hennessy,” Bradstock says. “We’ll have to go out with our begging bowl and try to get people to help us pay the supplement [but] he won’t run if he hasn’t got over his Hennessy [on 28 November].”
There are obvious similarities between Coneygree and Denman, the 2008 Gold Cup winner, who took the 2009 Hennessy Gold Cup under top weight, in terms of build and racing style.
“He’s a big, strong horse and he’ll love Newbury if the ground is right,” Bradstock said. “The way that they’ll beat us [this season] is if we get into a situation where stamina isn’t the most important thing. I’m quite sure that Vautour [the Gold Cup favourite] and horses like that have probably got another gear on us but that’s why the ground will need to be on the soft side of good, partly for safety but also because otherwise it would allow things to just sprint past him. Our hope for the season is that he continues to be the wonder horse that he has been so far.”
