Nicky Henderson hopes warmer weather will help dual Cheltenham champion Buveur D'Air's recovery from a freak injury.
The JP McManus-owned star hurdler has been on the sidelines since November 30, when a piece of wood became embedded in his foot during the Betfair Fighting Fifth Hurdle.
Defeated at very short odds of 2/13f that day, he finished lame on his right fore and had to have surgery to remove the splinter.
The Champion Hurdle winner of 2017 and 2018 has been recovering at Donnington Grove Veterinary Surgery near Newbury Racecourse, where 20-times champion jockey AP McCoy recently paid him a visit.
Trainer Nicky Henderson retains faith the nine-year-old will return to training once the injury has healed.
"We would love Buveur D’Air back and there is every reason to hope that he will be," he said.
"It was about as freak an injury as you will ever see. The only thing that you will learn from that is there are things that happen in a year that we have not seen in 40 years now."
Henderson won this year's Champion Hurdle with Epatante, the fourth consecutive winner of the opening day feature for McManus.
He hopes to aim her at Punchestown, if it survives the coronavirus sport fixtures cull, a track where Buveur D'Air won his last Grade One in 2019.
"You bump into something that you scarcely believe could happen," Henderson added about the injury.
"He wedged this piece of hurdle right down through his coronet band under the hoof.
"It came out of the pedal bone at the base of the hoof and they consequently had to cut out a huge piece of the front hoof in order to get all the woodwork out.
"Now he has got to grow a whole two inches of hoof to go back across the front of it.
"It is going slowly, the healing of a hoof speeds up a lot with the warmer weather.
"I suppose it is a bit like trees growing in the summer, hopefully hooves do too."
