Sprinter Sacre is expected to be declared for Saturday’s Clarence House Chase at Ascot on Thursday morning but his participation in the Grade One contest, which would be his first race for almost 13 months, remains in the balance with significant rain forecast at the racecourse on Wednesday night, Nicky Henderson, the nine-year-old’s trainer, said on Wednesday.
Henderson will walk the track at Ascot before Thursday’s 10am deadline for final declarations in the hope that the ground will be suitable to allow Sprinter Sacre to return to action. The ante-post market, however, suggests that it is odds-against that the top-rated chaser in training will line up on Saturday, with Dodging Bullets, the Tingle Creek Chase winner, replacing Sprinter Sacre as the favourite on Wednesday afternoon.
“Barry [Geraghty, Sprinter Sacre’s jockey] flew in this morning and went to Ascot on the way here,” Henderson said at Newbury on Wednesday. “He was very pleased, he said it’s soft, good-to-soft in places and quite a bit of nice good-to-soft. We’re obviously keen to run him and on what he said it was like this morning we would definitely say you’re going to go. The problem is tonight. I think tonight is the really bad bit.
“I think at the moment we’ve got to look at it as if we’re going to have to declare him because if the forecast is good on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, then whatever they get tonight, they should be able to get back to what Barry walked this morning. He has been in heavy ground, it’s just not ideal for his first run after all this time off and the speed and the jumping doesn’t work quite as well if you can’t bounce off it.”
Sprinter Sacre has already been steered around possible outings in the Tingle Creek Chase on 6 December and the Desert Orchid Chase on 27 December as Henderson seeks the right opportunity to give the 2013 Champion Chase winner his first run since he was pulled up midway through last season’s Desert Orchid Chase. He was subsequently found to be suffering from an irregular heartbeat.
Concerns raised by Sprinter Sacre’s failure to appear in either race, combined with the deteriorating weather forecast for Ascot, have seen his price for this weekend’s race drift steadily throughout the week.
Sprinter Sacre was odds-on at 10-11 on Monday afternoon, and still the narrow favourite at a best price of 7-4 on Wednesday morning, but by Wednesday afternoon, he was a 2-1 chance behind the 13-8 favourite Dodging Bullets, a horse that is more than two stone behind Sprinter Sacre on official ratings but has the considerable asset of recent Grade One-winning form against his name. Willie Mullins’s Twinlight, who won the Grade One Dial-A-Bet Chase at Leopardstown on 26 December, has also been popular as punters seek to oppose Sprinter Sacre, and is top-priced at 5-1, just ahead of Somersby, who won the race three seasons ago, on 11-2.
“Punters are not prepared to back Sprinter at any price,” Andrew Griffiths, spokesman for Betfred, said on Wednesday. “He’s out to an almost unbelievable 2-1 considering he was being supported at odds-on less than a week ago.”
If Sprinter Sacre appears among the final declarations for the Clarence House on Thursday – at which point bets on the horse would be refunded if he is later declared a non-runner – his price will be expected to shrink abruptly. It seems sure to be a finely balanced decision, as Henderson’s natural reluctance to give Sprinter Sacre a potentially hard race on demanding ground will be tempered by the knowledge that his subsequent options are very limited.
The Game Spirit Chase on Betfair Day at Newbury on 7 February is the obvious alternative if Sprinter Sacre is pulled out of Saturday’s race, but the going at Newbury on Wednesday was heavy and there is no guarantee of improvement by the first weekend in February. Nor is it certain that a card which has been abandoned twice in the past nine years will even take place. Sire De Grugy, last year’s Queen Mother Champion Chase winner, is also being aimed at Newbury, and has fewer questions to answer as he returns from a relatively minor injury.
Yet a run somewhere does seem to be essential if Sprinter Sacre is to contest the Queen Mother Champion Chase in March, for which he remains favourite at 2-1.
“I think he has to have a run,” the trainer said this week. “You can [go straight to Cheltenham], but he hasn’t had a run since the issue at Kempton.
“I think he’s got to have a race to give himself the belief that everything is 100 per cent. With his work at home, I’m sure it is.”
