“It was a bit mad, a bit ludicrous,” said Jamie Moore, sounding not at all like a jockey who had just enjoyed a seven-length success. He was referring to the plan he had hatched with his trainer father, Gary, to bring Sire De Grugy here for his Champion Chase warm-up 18 days before the big event, but his unorthodox plan could not have worked out better.
The chestnut was last seen at Newbury a fortnight ago depositing Moore over his head and into the Berkshire dirt. Had he run to anything like his normal form, Sire De Grugy would have gone straight to Cheltenham, but those close to him felt, in the circumstances, they simply had to whip him out again.
It has been a difficult winter for the reigning champion chaser, absent from April until the Newbury race by reason of a hip injury he sustained at home in November, but everything seemed to fall into place here. Yes, he was up against three inferior rivals but this was a handicap and he was also shouldering loads more weight than them. Far West, a Triumph Hurdle runner-up from the Paul Nicholls yard, was carrying two stone less but was beaten out of sight.
“It was his jumping,” Moore said. “Coming up the straight there, the last time, I was just thinking: ‘This is him.’ I was buzzing.”
Sire De Grugy put in bold leaps at the final two fences, rising without having been asked from the saddle as if keen to prove his wellbeing to an appreciative crowd. So what had gone wrong at Newbury? “He did it to me at Aintree a couple of years back and people didn’t know him then,” Moore said. “It was an identical type of run. It was his first run from a break and he was just a bit gassy. He landed on a couple of fences and he done that with me at Newbury.”
Moore loves this horse, who gave him his first Festival success in last year’s Champion Chase, and the jockey seized another chance to show he has a complete grasp of Sire De Grugy’s form. Asked if he was worried by the short gap from this test to the Cheltenham race, Moore said: “He scraped home at Kempton in Sprinter Sacre’s race [in December 2013]. That was 20 days before the Clarence House. His best win last year was the Clarence House. So we’re 18 days before. Last season was very lucky, this season’s gone a bit Pete Tong but I think he goes there a 7-1 shot and that’s probably about it. I wouldn’t swap him for anything.”
Sire De Grugy was indeed 7-1 for the Champion Chase before this but that price was quickly wiped off the boards and he is 9-2 second-favourite behind Sprinter Sacre on 3-1. In view of the fact that Sprinter Sacre has not won for almost two years, it is possible the market has got them the wrong way round.
Another top weight rumbled to glory at Kempton, where Rocky Creek beat his rivals in the Betbright Chase by six lengths and had his Grand National odds slashed from 33-1 to 14s. Only Shutthefrontdoor, widely expected to be the final National mount of Tony McCoy, is a shorter price.
“That’s just what we wanted,” said Nicholls, Rocky Creek’s trainer, who revealed on Saturday morning that he had backed the horse. “Sam [Twiston-Davies] just ambled round and then ran away with him coming to the second-last. He jumped and travelled well in last year’s National and, now that we have got his breathing right, the National should be right up his street.”
