Altior’s much-anticipated return to action was unexpectedly postponed on Saturday but Chacun Pour Soi made no mistake on his seasonal debut in Cork’s Hilly Way Chase on Sunday, cementing his position as the clear favourite for the Queen Mother Champion Chase at Cheltenham in March as he did so.
Chacun Pour Soi is now top-priced at 3-1 to win the two-mile championship at the Festival, from 4-1 overnight, having been well in command in Sunday’s Grade Two contest when his closest pursuers, Cash Back and Djingle, departed at the final fence. Both horses and their jockeys emerged unscathed.
“It was a great start for him,” Paul Townend, Chacun Pour Soi’s jockey, said. “He was fairly asleep early on in the race and got a good blow into himself. He had the other two well-beaten when they fell at the last and was entitled to win. It’s good to get him back on the track.”
Townend added that the winner’s jumping had been “deadly” and that he should “come on plenty for it” ahead of possible Grade One targets at Leopardstown in December and February.
Willie Mullins’s stable jockey passed up the chance to ride Min, the favourite, in Sunday’s Grade One John Durkan Memorial Chase at Punchestown in order to partner Chacun Pour Soi at Cork, and the trainer’s son, Paddy, was the beneficiary as Min completed a hat-trick in a race that was run in thick fog.
Min was in front from the off and held off the late challenge of his stable companion, Tornado Flyer, by a length.
Altior, meanwhile, is top-priced at 7-1 for the Champion Chase, and Nicky Henderson may not find out until Tuesday whether the Peterborough Chase, which was due to be run at waterlogged Huntingdon on Sunday, will be re-scheduled for later this week, giving the trainer an early opportunity to get Altior’s season back on track.
Taunton’s card on Thursday has staged a rescheduled Peterborough Chase in the past and looks like the obvious option again, although it was run over an extended two miles, five furlongs – rather than the traditional two-and-a-half miles – in 2017.
Henderson mentioned last year’s defeat at Ascot several times in the run-up to Saturday’s Tingle Creek Chase, without ever suggesting that he expected the ground at Sandown to be an issue, and he brought it up again in a prickly interview with Racing TV on Saturday evening after criticism on social media of his out-of-the-blue decision to scratch from the race late on Friday.
“You saw what happened at Ascot last year,” Henderson told the interviewer Lydia Hislop. “I said then I should never have run him, because I’ll get lynched, I’ve done that [scratched Altior from the Tingle Creek] and you have tried to kill me.
“Luckily, there are some sensible people out here who totally and utterly agree with what I’ve done. The horse comes before anything else and his well-being, his welfare is the only thing I care about.”
It is, of course, entirely up to any horse’s owners whether to run in any race, be it a Grade One or a seller, and the horse’s best interests always come first. The latest twist in the Altior tale, though, still leaves several questions hanging, not least as Henderson described the Sandown ground as a “bottomless glue pot” in a separate interview, and suggested too that the Queen Mother Champion Chase is the only race of the season that matters.
Betfair, which spent a lot of money sponsoring the Tingle Creek, was understandably a little put-out to hear its race written off as a little more than an optional prep for the Festival, while Andrew Cooper, Sandown’s clerk of the course, would be within his rights to take similar exception to the “glue-pot” comment, which seems a little exaggerated, to say the least.
Monday’s best bets
Plumpton has retained its long-running bonus scheme for selected novice chase winners this season, despite the financial woes inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, with £40,000 on offer if the winner goes on to score in any race at the Cheltenham Festival. With just two runners going to post for Monday’s bonus race, however, after Edwardstone was scratched from the final decs, they could be forgiven for wondering why they bothered.
It is at least a fairly competitive match as these things go, with Paul Nicholls’s Stratagem currently top-priced at 1-2 while Thebannerkingrebel, from the Jamie Snowden yard, is 15-8. The two runners had almost identical ratings over hurdles – 140 and 139 respectively – but Stratagem (1.00) has a slight advantage in terms of experience having finished second on his chasing debut at Warwick month.
Fortunately, the rest of the card is a little more competitive, with Kaproyale (2.35) deserving close inspection on his second start in a handicap. Olly Murphy’s runner was a decent third on his at Hereford last month but has still been dropped a pound since.
At Musselburgh, No Regrets (2.15) catches the eye at around 11-4 to build on his second behind Kaizer at Carlisle in October. The race was run in a decent time and Mick Maestro, around five lengths behind No Regrets in third, was a winner next time.
Musselburgh 12.15 Animore 12.45 Mig Des Taillons 1.15 Armattiekan 1.45 Breguet Boy 2.15 No Regrets (nap) 2.45 Tokaramore 3.15 Sin A Bhfuil
Plumpton 12.30 Captain Biggles 1.00 Edwardstone 1.30 Midnightreflection 2.05 Smurphy Enki 2.35 Kaproyale 3.05 Rumble B 3.35 Gelino Bello
Chelmsford City 1.55 Water Iris 2.25 Secret Treaties (nb) 2.55 Al Nayyir 3.25 Durabella 3.55 Mini Milk 4.25 Vincenzo Coccotti 4.55 Celtic Classic 5.25 Mizen Master
Wolverhampton 4.05 Catbird Seat 4.40 Chitra 5.10 G For Gabrial 5.40 Legal Reform 6.10 Rhubarb Bikini 6.40 Manton Grange 7.10 Tomouh
Armattiekan (1.15) should also go well on the same card, while Secret Treaties (2.25) can follow up a recent course success at Chelmsford.
