Silviniaco Conti, who will attempt to win the King George VI Chase for the third year running on Boxing Day, finished second on his seasonal debut in a handicap hurdle at Kempton on Monday but showed enough of his customary enthusiasm for the flat Sunbury track to remain top-priced at 6-1 for the King George at the same course in just under eight weeks’ time.
Silviniaco Conti was a promising hurdler in the early stages of his career, when his successes included a Grade Two event at Ascot in November 2010. Monday’s race was his first start over timber since February 2011 and his first run in public since recording his sixth Grade One victory over fences in the Betfred Bowl at Aintree in April. On Monday he travelled well over a trip short of his best but had no answer when Brother Tedd, the 11-8 favourite, accelerated smoothly on the turn for home and he eventually finished four lengths behind Philip Hobbs’s six-year-old.
Paul Nicholls, Silviniaco Conti’s trainer, was delighted with his performance and will now send the nine-year-old to the Grade One Betfair Chase on 21 November, a race he has won in two of the last three seasons.
“Philip’s horse was always going to win but mine has done the job we wanted,” Nicholls said. “He’s had a really good blow and has run better than he did first time out last year [fifth of seven in the Charlie Hall Chase at Wetherby]. We’ve now got just over two weeks to get him right.
“He will come on for that a lot just because of the circumstances – we’ve had problems with him. That will put him bang-on for Haydock. He is a three-mile chaser and what he wants is to be jumping and galloping.
“He will do plenty of work as he thrives on it. He is plenty heavy enough but he will just tighten up and be spot-on.”
Silviniaco Conti is top-priced at 2-1 for the Betfair Chase, which is the first leg of a possible £1m “triple crown” of major jumps races, completed by the King George and the Gold Cup at Cheltenham.
Should Silviniaco Conti take the first two legs, as he did last year, pressure would increase on Nicholls and the gelding’s owners to send him to the Gold Cup, where he has been beaten three years running. Nicholls suggested after Silviniaco Conti’s latest failure at Cheltenham, when seventh of 16 behind Coneygree, that he would not run the gelding in chasing’s championship event again.
Smad Place, the runner-up in the RSA Chase at Cheltenham in 2014 and another also-ran behind Coneygree in the Gold Cup eight months ago, was an impressive winner of the Graduation Chase on the Kempton card and will run next in the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury seven days after the Betfair Chase.
“I only just had him ready for this as he did have a hold-up six weeks ago [wind problem] and we did a little operation on him,” Alan King, the trainer of Smad Place, said. “It is great to have him back. I made a complete mess of him last year as I ran him in the Hennessy first time out without a prep run. He ran well but he finished really tired and never got over it. “ He is back showing his old spark. That will set him up for the Hennessy. It will do his confidence good, getting his head back in front again.”
Aidan Coleman, who is second behind Richard Johnson in the jump jockeys’ title race, has decided not to press charges against four individuals who were arrested after he was assaulted in the weighing room at Southwell last month.
Two men were reported to have broken into the weighing room after the last race at the track on 29 September, after which Coleman received a blow to the face.
Runhappy, the winner of the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Keeneland on Saturday, appears to have run his last race for trainer Maria Borell following an announcement that he will now be trained by Laura Wohlers. Runhappy’s new trainer is the racing manager for Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, the gelding’s owner, and also McIngvale’s sister-in-law.
News of the split between McIngvale and Borell, who has only a handful of horses in her care, caused widespread astonishment in American racing, as it arrived the day after Runhappy’s hugely popular success in the Sprint.
There was no hint of any dispute in the aftermath of his victory, which was achieved without the benefit of the drug Lasix, and both McIngvale and Borell were united in their belief that horses should not run on the medication.
“Just went from the best day of my life to the worst day of my life” Borell tweeted shortly after the news broke. Wohlers, however, was quoted by www.bloodhorse.com suggesting that “the decision to move in a different direction was not made today”.
McIngvale is the founder and owner of a major furniture retailing business. Runhappy’s victory was his first Grade One success as a racehorse owner, however, and the timing of his split with Borell has soured one of the most positive stories from the Breeders’ Cup weekend at Keeneland.
