One week on from Coneygree’s Gold Cup and three weeks before Ladies’ Day at Aintree, Friday afternoon here was a time and place for National Hunt racing to take a breath or two before pushing on. Coneygree himself, who is trained 20 miles away, will parade here during racing on Saturday, but for many of those riding and training the afternoon’s winners it is the Grand National at Aintree on 11 April that now looms large on the horizon.
It will, of course, be Tony McCoy’s last National, and Jonjo O’Neill’s Shutthefrontdoor is the 8-1 favourite for Britain’s only £1m steeplechase in the widespread expectation that he will be McCoy’s chosen ride. The connections of 39 other runners will be hoping to frustrate him, however, and Philip Hobbs, who had a double here on Friday, will be prominent among them with Balthazar King, currently a 14-1 chance.
Balthazar King was runner-up behind Pineau De Re at Aintree last season, the second time that Hobbs has saddled the runner-up in the National. He is most familiar to regular punters as a specialist over Cheltenham’s cross-country course, where he has recorded four victories, including the Festival’s handicap over the unusual obstacles last year.
This season, though, Hobbs has kept him fresh for Aintree and he has not raced since a victory over the cross-country circuit in November.
“Hopefully it will stay dry for him because he doesn’t want it soft,” Hobbs said after winning the opening race on the card with Rock The Kasbah, who got home by a nose from Inner Drive. “He’s 11, which they say is the most likely winning age, and it could well be his last chance.
“We could [have done with him at Cheltenham] as we didn’t have a winner, but would he have won? He was off a higher mark than when he scraped home by a nose [in 2014], so why would he win this year and probably leave the National at Cheltenham? That was the thinking, anyway, and if you look through his form, his best form has always been after a layoff, so it’s best to go to the National as fresh as can be.”
Balthazar King does not school over special fences to prepare for his cross-country races and it will be no different as Hobbs puts the finishing touches to his Aintree preparation.
“We never school them over anything different at home,” Hobbs said, “and we haven’t won a Grand National but we’ve won the Fox Hunters and the Topham [over the National fences at the same meeting] and had two seconds in the National. We have four in the race. Chance Du Roy will definitely run and I think probably Gas Line Boy as well. It would be a great race to win, and it would be nice if it happened. We’ll keep running them and hopefully it will happen eventually.”
If there was a horse here with the potential to be a Graded runner at the Festival next year, it was probably Rock The Kasbah, who edged home by the minimum distance but is built to jump fences and will be doing so next season.
Harry Fry is another trainer looking forward to Aintree after a blank week at Cheltenham, where three of his runners made the frame but several more proved disappointing for a stable where the strike rate rarely drops below 25%.
A low-level virus has been identified as the reason why horses including Jollyallan, a 9-1 chance for the Supreme Novice Hurdle, failed to run up to expectation, and Fry, whose Shuil Royale took the Pheasant Inn Handicap Chase, is confident that his horses will have shaken it off by the time Aintree’s Festival meeting opens on 9 April.
“As he [Shuil Royale] has shown, it’s not all of them and they are coming through so we will kick on again,” Fry said. “It’s just the timing, but the weather at this time of the year always helps and it’s just one of those things. We will have to be patient and the horses are turning the corner.
“The last couple of months have probably been our lowest yet [in terms of strike-rate], but then we’ve been running in the most competitive races so far. We had three at Cheltenham which got within inches and it’s frustrating to get that close, but we were delighted with them at the same time. People only remember the winners and that’s what we’re all in it for, but we’ll just have to try again next year.”
Rock On Ruby, the 2012 Champion Hurdle winner, is the stable’s best hope of a Grade One winner at Aintree.
“He missed Cheltenham but he’s proof that what we’re doing is working because he’s right back on his A-game,” Fry said. “It’s all systems go for [the Aintree Hurdle], and it might be a silver lining because three miles [in the World Hurdle at Cheltenham] would have been a gruelling test.”
