It took a month or two for Paul Nicholls to find his stride this season but there is a sudden relentlessness about his progress now. The champion trainer sent three runners to Exeter on Thursday and returned home with a treble, and he repeated the trick here on Friday, when his three winners included a Grade Two double with Capitaine and Politologue in the Supreme Novice Hurdle Trial and Mitie Novice Chase respectively.
Nicholls’s other runner, and winner, was Topofthegame in the maiden hurdle that opened the card, and therein lies the real concern for any trainer going toe-to-toe with the champion. Colin Tizzard has a glut of top-class chasers in his yard at present, including Cue Card and Thistlecrack, but he still trails Nicholls by nearly £400,000 in the title race. Nicholls, in other words, is winning the league with his youth team and his rivals can only wonder what they might achieve as more seasoned performers next season.
Politologue, who produced a series of breathtaking jumps to have his race won as he cleared the last, is an obvious candidate for Grade One contests next season, and probably this coming spring as well. Some bold-jumping front-runners pay so little respect to the fences that you fear they might miss one out altogether but Politologue always seemed to have the race under control and coped admirably on the couple of occasions when he got in a little too close.
Nicholls had suggested earlier in the afternoon that he is only “50-50” to have a runner in this year’s King George VI Chase at Kempton Park on Boxing Day, a race he has won nine times in the last 19 years. Silviniaco Conti, the winner for the last two years, is his only entry but he is a 50-1 chance to beat leading ante-post contenders such as Cue Card, Thistlecrack and Coneygree.
“I’ll leave him in at the five-day stage but if they’re all in it, he won’t go,” Nicholls said. “If Thistlecrack didn’t run and there were only five or six in it, we might be tempted, as he’s won the race before and he likes the track, but I want to look at it first.
“I don’t think they need to be worrying about us on this year’s form and there’s every chance we might be better off waiting for the race he won at Ascot [the Betfair Ascot Chase in February].”
It is not difficult to imagine Politologue being up to the required standard in 12 months’ time, however.
“He’s a proper horse and next season, when he’s six, he’ll be ready to go up and take on the big boys,” Nicholls said. “We need to get some experience into him and I’m not that mad about going too far with him this season, two-five or two-six is about as far as he needs to go because he jumps and he’s got plenty of pace.
“I’m really focusing on next season, he will be awesome and we’ve just got to mind him for that really. All these horses are horses for the future for us, and I’m not going to overface them.
“If he tells us that we should let him run in a big one along the way, we’ll let him, but I’m not that keen on three miles this year.”
Despite Nicholls’s reservations, Politologue was cut to around 14-1 for the three-mile RSA Novice Chase at the Cheltenham Festival in March but he is also now the same price – and as short as 8-1 – for the JLT Novice Chase, over two and a half miles.
Capitaine is another horse for the future and Nicholls even mentioned the 2018 Arkle Trophy as a potential target for the four-year-old after his 9-1 success earlier on the card.
“I’d always thought he was smart but I completely got the tactics wrong [when he was beaten] at Haydock last time. I said to Harry [Cobden] that if he was keen, he should drop him in, but the winner got a soft lead and we didn’t pick him up on the heavy ground.
“I told Sam [Twiston-Davies] to dictate from the front today and just keep quickening. 9-1 was a massive price and if he hadn’t run at Haydock the other day, he would have been half that price. But the experience wasn’t lost on him and he had a penalty today as well.
“We’ve got a lot of really smart youngsters that are the future for us, he was bought to be a two-mile chaser and that’s what he’ll do next season. He’s the sort who could run in the Supreme [Novice Hurdle] if he improves again, but I could see him in the Arkle 12 months afterwards.”
