Tony McCoy, who retired from race-riding earlier this year after 20 consecutive seasons as National Hunt’s champion jockey, escaped unhurt on Wednesday morning after the car he was driving was involved in an accident that closed the M4 motorway.
McCoy was travelling east between junctions 14 and 15 of the M4 when a van and a car collided immediately in front of him. The van overturned, and all three lanes of the eastbound carriageway and one lane westbound were then closed as emergency services attended the scene and police cleared wreckage. In all, six people were reported to have been caught up in the accident, a passenger in McCoy’s car included.
“I’m fine and so is the other person in the car,” McCoy told the Racing Post on Wednesday evening. “We were involved in an accident on the M4 between junctions 14 and 15. A van and a car collided in front of us and I ended up with nowhere to go as a result. Fortunately, nobody was injured but all the vehicles were badly damaged.”
The Betfair Chase at Haydock on Saturday, the first Grade One event of the season in Britain, may be run on ground no slower than soft following a revised weather forecast for the Lancashire track which cut earlier predictions of likely rainfall before the race by half.
A dour slog through deep ground was anticipated when the five-day entries for the Betfair Chase were published on Monday, and Kirkland Tellwright, Haydock’s clerk of the course, suggested at the time there might be 40mm of rain in the run-up to Haydock’s biggest race of the National Hunt season.
Quicker ground than expected could work to the advantage of the front-runner Cue Card, who took a strong renewal of the Betfair Chase two seasons ago and is the 3-1 second-favourite behind the even-money chance Silviniaco Conti, who was the winner on heavy ground 12 months ago with Cue Card back in fourth.
“We’d had about 30mm of rain up until Saturday but since then, it hasn’t been so bad,” Tellwright said on Wednesday. “We had 6mm yesterday and quite a brisk shower this morning but the forecast is better than it was. As of this morning, we’re looking at getting something like 15mm, whereas it had been more like 30mm, so we’re in a pretty good place.
“We’re certain to be soft and we may be heavy or perhaps a mixture of the two, but there’s a hope now that it won’t be heavy. We’re not facing wall-to-wall rain. I don’t believe it will be a slog anyway given that it’s the first fixture of the season, it’s not a case of worn ground that’s been opened up by previous fixtures.”
The Betfair Chase is not the undisputed centre of attention on Saturday as Ascot is staging the Stella Artois 1965 Chase, a Grade Two event that is expected to mark the reappearance of Vautour, the favourite for the Cheltenham Gold Cup in March. Tellwright, though, accepts that clashes are inevitable as the National Hunt season builds towards Christmas.
“That’s life,” he said. “We tend to run in tandem with another big fixture, and it’s frequently Ascot. There’s pretty much an understanding between us as to who is cock of the dunghill on which day, and we see to it that the actual races don’t clash.
“Vautour is a second-season novice, and you would be surprised if he made his debut in open company in the thick of something as hot as we would hope the Betfair Chase would be.
“Sure, we’d love to have him, but one has to be realistic and if there is a chance of an easier introduction for a second-season novice, you’re always likely to take it.”
Bristol De Mai, one of last season’s best juvenile hurdlers, is top-priced at 20-1 for the Arkle Trophy at the Cheltenham Festival after recording his first success over fences in the Highflyer/Million In Mind Novice Chase at Warwick on Wednesday.
Nigel Twiston-Davies’s four-year-old made all the running and put in a series of impressive jumps on the way to a 19-length defeat of Karazak, also a useful juvenile last season. His win also franked the form of Bristol De Mai’s debut over fences, when he finished seven lengths behind Philip Hobb’s Garde La Victoire, the winner of a Grade Two event at Cheltenham on Sunday.
“He is very brave for a young horse and has got loads of scope,” Daryl Jacob, Bristol De Mai’s jockey, said. “You have just got to trust him and I don’t think I’ve winged an open ditch like I did the first for a long time.
“For a big horse, he can get himself out of trouble very quickly. I think the older he is, the better he will get. He is still quite tall and quite lean. We are hoping that in time, he will start filling out and that he will turn into a real class horse.”
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