Has Cue Card missed his chance? One of the most popular jumpers of recent years sets out on his eighth season on Saturday, with another tilt at the Cheltenham Gold Cup as his ultimate target, but the general view appears to be that, having fallen three fences out with the great race at his mercy in March, he is now too old to make amends.
Cue Card will turn 11 on New Year’s Day, older than every Gold Cup winner since 1969. Kauto Star and Denman were repeatedly beaten in the race after reaching double figures. Why should he fare better?
The answer, if there is an answer, is the astonishing durability Cue Card has already shown and those close to him have nothing but positive, even excited reports to offer of his preparation for Saturday’s Charlie Hall Chase at Wetherby. “He feels absolutely superb,” says Joe Tizzard, the man who knows him best.
“There’s nothing in his home work that shows us he won’t be as good as he was last season. I don’t think it’ll be an issue. He’s really enthusiastic. He doesn’t show his age at all.
“This time last year he had questions to answer. He’d missed Cheltenham again; he’d had breathing problems. Now he’s in beautiful shape and just in the middle of April he was running as well as he ever has.”
Tizzard was Cue Card’s jockey back in 2010 when the horse made his name as a 40-1 shot in the Festival’s Champion Bumper who somehow hosed up by eight lengths. There have been six more Grade One wins since that day.
But the image his fans cannot shake from their heads is of him stepping into Cheltenham’s third-last, seconds after Paddy Brennan had edged him out and asked him to go up alongside the leader. It must have been a particularly awful moment for Tizzard, who quit the saddle two years ago and now assists his father, Colin, trainer of Cue Card and other classy chasers on the Dorset and Somerset border.
“The initial feeling was one of huge disappointment because he was going so well,” Tizzard says, pointing out that Cue Card would have landed a £1m bonus had he won the Gold Cup. “But by 6am the next morning, after I’d had a cup of coffee and thought about it, it was more like ‘Thank God’.
“Because it could have been a lot worse. We were just glad he was able to get up.” To the inevitable question about whether Cue Card would have beaten Don Cossack that day, Tizzard responds with a phlegmatic: “If you don’t jump, you don’t win. We just don’t know.”
At least Cue Card was able to bounce back quickly with his Aintree success and the bookmakers expect something similar on Saturday, offering no bigger than 8-11 about him for the Wetherby feature. He is also favourite for next month’s Betfair Chase and second only to Vautour in lists for the King George. But when it comes to the Gold Cup, expectations are lower; you can have 11-1 if you like, twice the odds available about his whippersnapper stablemate Thistlecrack, who jumped fences for the first time only this week.
Where will Tizzard’s loyalties lie if they meet in March? He laughs. “We’ll accept what comes. Cue Card has been amazing to me personally and to the yard. He put us on the map. But I don’t mind if they finish first and second, either way.
“I just want them both to get a clear round and let the best one win. I’ll be cheering them both on. Look, it’d be lovely to get them both there in the best possible form that we can. It’d make for a huge race. The Gold Cup is the pinnacle for us.”
And will he be wishing himself once more on Cue Card’s back when the gelding canters down to the start on Saturday? “It’s not as bad as it was the first season. The first season I really missed it and you’ll always have that ‘It used to be me’ factor.
“I’m a lot more nervous these days. Watching Thistlecrack I was a nervous wreck because I don’t have control over it any more. As a jockey you might get butterflies before a big race but then the tape went up and away you went and did your job. Now I just watch and smoke.”
