Cue Card, a veteran of four Cheltenham Festivals and twice a Grade One winner at the season’s showpiece meeting, is likely to revert to front-running tactics when he attempts to win the Ryanair Chase on 12 March for the second time in three years, Joe Tizzard, assistant trainer to his father Colin, said on Tuesday.
It is part of the punters’ folklore at Cheltenham that it is very difficult to make all the running in one of the Festival’s Grade One championship events, but Joe Tizzard proved that it can be done when he steered Cue Card to victory in the 2013 Ryanair Chase. Cue Card followed up that success by finishing second to Sprinter Sacre, the top-rated chaser in training, in the Melling Chase at Aintree, but has since raced only at either end of the distance range, lining up twice at two miles and a furlong and four times at three miles, including a victory in the Betfair Chase at Haydock in November 2013.
Cue Card missed a planned run in last season’s Gold Cup due to injury, but remains a great favourite of the Festival crowds, having finished second to Sprinter Sacre in the 2012 Arkle Trophy and fourth in the 2011 Supreme Novice Hurdle after winning the Festival Bumper at 40-1 in 2010.
“We decided that he hasn’t really seen the [three-mile] trip out this year and he probably got away with it at Haydock last year,” Tizzard said.
“He gets the two-and-a-half miles very well, and when he gets into a rhythm and really starts jumping he gains lengths like that, so there’s no reason why we wouldn’t ride him similarly to two years ago. If someone wants to go quicker than him, that’s fine, but we’ll bounce him out and use his jumping because we know he gets the trip so well.”
Cue Card was last seen finishing fifth behind Silviniaco Conti in the King George VI Chase at Kempton Park on Boxing Day, a race in which he finished second to the same horse in 2013.
“He had a horrible over-reach after the King George, but he’s back cantering now and we’ve got plenty of time to get him right for Cheltenham,” Tizzard said. “We won’t be able to get a prep run into him, but going straight to the Ryanair is the plan. If you go back to when they were turning in in the King George this season or at Haydock, he had every chance and perhaps he just didn’t see it out. He missed Cheltenham completely last year but he’s a very, very good horse and he’s performed every time he’s been to the Festival. He’s been in the first four every time he’s run there and we’re looking forward to taking him back.”
Cue Card is top-priced at 7-1 to win at Cheltenham in one of the most open markets on a Grade One event at the Festival. Dynaste, last year’s winner, and Don Cossack, who took the Grade One John Durkan Memorial Chase in December, head the market at 4-1, while Johns Spirit and Champagne Fever - another possible front-runner - are also prominent in the betting.
Optimism in Dubai that the switch from a synthetic surface to dirt at Meydan racecourse would attract more runners to its World Cup meeting from the United States was not borne out when the initial entries for the sport’s most valuable single-day meeting were published on Tuesday.
A total of 24 US-trained horses have been nominated for the $10m World Cup, the world’s richest race, a drop of six from last year when the 10-furlong contest was staged on Tapeta for the fifth and final time. The quality of the potential runners is impressive, however, with Bayern and California Chrome, first and third in a memorable renewal of the Breeders’ Cup Classic in November, among the nominations, along with Jamie Osborne’s Toast Of New York, who split them at Santa Anita.
In all, the first seven home in the Classic are among the possible runners in the Dubai World Cup, while Main Sequence, the Breeders’ Cup Turf winner, is among the nominations for the Dubai Sheema Classic, worth a total of $6m. The Japan Cup winner Epiphaneia, who was recently named as the second-best racehorse in the world in 2014, is also a possible runner in the same race.
Triolo D’Alene, the winner of the 2013 Topham Trophy over the Grand National fences at Aintree, is unlikely to be fit to contest the Grand National itself in April after suffering a knee injury. Nicky Henderson’s eight-year-old looked like a live contender for the National when he finished third behind Unioniste on his seasonal debut at Sandown earlier this month.
“It is very boring, unfortunately, as he ran such a good race at Sandown,” Henderson said on Tuesday. “We have a back-up X-ray in two weeks that will tell us where we are going with him. The one thing we had in our mind was the Grand National, but I’d say at this stage that is probably unlikely.”
Twinlight, a Grade One winner at Leopardstown’s Christmas meeting, could lead Willie Mullins’s challenge for the Grade Two Tied Cottage Chase at Punchestown on Sunday. Eleven entries for the race also include Hidden Cyclone, the runner-up behind Twinlight at Christmas, while an unexpected name to feature in the possible line-up is the novice Clarcam, who finished second behind the impressive winner Un De Sceaux in Sunday’s Grade One Arkle Novice Chase at Leopardstown.
The strength of Mullins’s team for the Cheltenham Festival in March seems certain to be one of the big talking points of the meeting, and the depth of his challenge was underlined when BetFred priced him up at just 2-9 on Tuesday to emerge as the Festival’s leading trainer.
Paul Nicholls is quoted at 6-1 to stop Mullins completing a hat-trick after securing the title in the last two seasons, with Nicky Henderson at 7-1. Mullins is also favourite at 4-5 in a match bet to beat the combined total of winners for Nicholls and Henderson, who can be backed at even money.
