No one calls him The Black Aeroplane any more. Sprinter Sacre, the greatest steeplechaser since Arkle, has become the big black question mark at the heart of Cheltenham Festival, a riddle to which all self-respecting punters must try to form an answer. Two years ago, he won the Queen Mother Champion Chase with total authority. Nothing finished within 19 lengths of him and the runner-up was a previous winner of the race. He was not just the best two-mile chaser around, he was the best there had been for at least half a century.
He won again at Aintree the next month and again, a fortnight later, at Punchestown in Ireland. There the run stopped. In the past 23 months, he has raced twice, without success, the result of an irregular heartbeat and the enormous patience shown by those close to him as they inched him back towards the track.
It was a shock when Sprinter Sacre dropped out at halfway at Kempton Park’s Christmas meeting in 2013 and worrying to be told his ticker had let him down. But the problem corrected itself in two days and he was still odds-on to retain his crown at the Festival three months later. Who would have thought it would take more than a year from Kempton to get him into competitive action once more?
“The guv’nor was just not quite happy with him. I wasn’t quite happy with a few little things,” says Nico de Boinville, perhaps the man who knows Sprinter Sacre best. He arrived at the Lambourn stables of Nicky Henderson five winters ago and was told he would be the regular work rider for a promising animal, newly arrived from France. Subsequent years of riding Sprinter Sacre most mornings have made him almost blase about a privilege most horsemen would give much to experience.
They also made De Boinville the right man to tell Henderson, through the first part of this season, that the great horse was not quite himself, long after the vets had ruled that his heart problem was a thing of the past. “It wasn’t anything you could put your finger on necessarily and he never missed a day’s work, but we just didn’t want to send him to the track if he wasn’t going to perform. It wouldn’t have been fair to the horse.”
When the big day finally came, at Ascot in mid-January, Sprinter Sacre did not look the force of old, trailing home three lengths behind Dodging Bullets, the first horse to beat him in 11 completed races over fences. De Boinville calls it “a perfectly acceptable run”, but a similar effort would mean another deflating defeat on Wednesday.
“You’ll see a different horse,” De Boinville says. “You have to remember, he hadn’t had a proper run since Punchestown. Everything’s gone to plan. He’s come on leaps and bounds since his Ascot run.
“He’s good enough, from what we’re seeing at home. From that time [Ascot], things have gone unbelievably well. I’m a glass half-empty kind of person, I would always be very realistic, but I’ve been very upbeat about him recently.”
That echoes the view of Henderson, who has repeatedly used a simile of daffodils coming into bloom when describing Sprinter Sacre’s progress. Barry Geraghty, the horse’s jockey, is known for striking an upbeat tone whenever possible but he is also convincingly pleased with developments. “He didn’t jump as well as he can do and that made it harder work for him,” Geraghty says of Ascot. “But he ran a good race and he looks and seems an awful lot better now.”
The jockey appears more cheerful than any man has a right to be during a revealing exchange of short sentences. So Sprinter was just a bit rusty at Ascot? “I’d say so.” When did you sit on him? “Last Friday.” How’d it go? “Wasn’t rusty.”
Beaming now, the Irishman adds: “If we get the same horse I sat on last Friday, I’d say we’ll have a bit of fun round Cheltenham. He felt no different to how he was [at his peak]. Whether that’s 90%, 100% or maybe he’s even better, God only knows.”
Nor is Geraghty worried by the finding of Ascot’s vets that Sprinter Sacre had bled into his airways. “He had blood. It wasn’t a haemhorrage. I know I’ve won good races in the past on horses that have bled. It wouldn’t be of any bearing to me.”
That positivity is reflected in the betting. Despite his lack of recent success, Sprinter Sacre is 11-4 favourite for a hot race. Coral bookmakers report that, at this stage, no other Cheltenham winner would cost them more. Yet form analysts are cautious.
“There are three obvious scenarios,” says Timeform’s jumps editor, Dan Barber. “One, he comes on for his reappearance, like any normal horse would, and proves he’s still the best around at two miles. Two, he proves to have a serious physical problem and falls to pieces. Three, he comes there with every chance and is beaten on merit.” The first of those is “probably too big an ask”, Barber feels. “Two and three are more likely.”
Jim McGrath, who will provide analysis for Channel 4, takes a similar view. “The horse has had to contend with an awful lot,” he says. “If he puts in a decent performance, similar to Ascot, and gets round reasonably well, I think that’s as much as you can expect. I’d love to be wrong about it all, I’m just realistic. To me, it’s a similar scenario to Big Buck’s [a former champion whose comeback ended in defeat last year]. People are expecting too much.”
