Two and a half seasons into his training career, Dan Skelton was every inch the old pro here on Friday after a double that took his prize-money total for the campaign past half a million pounds. Only Paul Nicholls and Philip Hobbs beat him to it, and the matter-of-fact way that Skelton discussed Festival targets for his winners had the air of a trainer whose top-three status is no early-season blip.
His Cheltenham ambitions for Kasakh Noir and Three Musketeers are not fanciful either. Three Musketeers was a convincing winner of the feature race, the Grade Two Fuller’s London Pride Novice Chase, won last year by the subsequent Gold Cup winner, Coneygree. He is a 20-1 chance for the JLT Novice Chase in March, while Kasakh Noir, who took the opening Juvenile Hurdle by 16 lengths, is joint-favourite for the Triumph Hurdle with several bookmakers, also at 16-1.
Three Musketeers was placed in Grade One company over hurdles, but he was a 4-1 chance for Friday’s race having been beaten at even-money on his chasing debut at Huntingdon at the start of the month. He travelled easily and jumped well on the way to a four-and-a-half-length defeat of Activial, and will be kept to two and a half miles as Skelton plans a route towards Cheltenham.
“At Huntingdon, I fully expected him to run all the way to the line,” Skelton said, “so when he blew up turning in, I was disappointed with myself because I couldn’t see it happening. In hindsight, it has probably helped for today because he’s taken a massive step forward and he hasn’t had to carry a 7lb penalty for winning. Sometimes you get smiled on when you make errors.
“That’s definitely his trip and he’s always been high-class. I don’t want to run him a lot, but when I do, I want to run him against good horses. He’ll have an entry in the RSA Chase [over three miles] but at the moment it’s looking JLT and I’d prefer to go on that track [the new course] rather than the other track [the old course].”
Like all but a handful of Skelton’s runners, both Three Musketeers and Kasakh Noir were ridden by his brother Harry, though few winners this season will require less assistance from the saddle than Kasakh Noir.
It is no great surprise when a winner clears away from the runner-up on soft ground here, or when its jockey eases down inside the final furlong, but few manage to do both at the same time and Kasakh Noir deserves his place among the favourites for the Triumph.
“He’s been very precocious at home since we started with him, and he was either going to be very good, or be gassy and not all that pleasant to ride and fall in a heap two out,” Skelton said. “Obviously he’s done the former of the two, but to do it around here first time is a good thing. There’s a lot of horses in there giving him weight, which makes the form difficult to quantify, but no doubt there’s going to be quotes for all the big races and he’s good enough to head along that route. He’s a big horse and a chaser as well, and I’d have sworn before today that he’d be better on better ground. Sometimes in this ground in any race, you can get a false reading if there’s only one horse that goes in it. I wouldn’t say that’s the case with this horse, but he does have to go and back this up now.”
Harry Skelton has now ridden 44 winners for his brother so far this season, a huge advance on the eight he managed in the entire campaign in 2012-13.
“There’s a jockey who three years ago was on the scrapheap,” Dan Skelton said. “All he needed was a couple of horses to ride. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good enough, as current evidence shows. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than legging my brother up on to a horse and saying: ‘Off you trot.’”
Like Skelton, Harry Fry, the trainer of Activial, emerged from a job as assistant to Paul Nicholls to launch a successful training career. He was also in effect in charge of Rock On Ruby’s preparation to win the 2012 Champion Hurdle before taking charge of the gelding after taking out a licence, and he paid tribute to Rock On Ruby here on Friday following the news that the 10-year-old has been retired.
“There’s a sense of sadness but it’s also a time for celebration because he’s been a fantastic horse for us,” Fry said. “It’s a tendon injury that ordinarily would require 12 months to come back into training. As soon as we spoke to the owners, it was a unanimous decision to retire him, and retire him at the top of his game after a popular success at Ascot on Saturday.
“I owe my career to him. Paul was very gracious in sharing the credit [for the Champion Hurdle], and the owners have now given him to my wife, Ciara, so he can enjoy a happy retirement with us, and we will cherish him for a long time yet.
“I don’t think he was ever out of the first three over hurdles, and the only time he was out of the first four was in the Arkle. We owe it to him to look after him extremely well.”
