Un De Sceaux, who heads the market for the Queen Mother Champion Chase at Cheltenham in March, is odds-on to make a winning seasonal debut in the Betfair Tingle Creek Chase at Sandown on Saturday after Nicky Henderson decided that Sprinter Sacre, the 2013 Champion Chase winner, would skip the Grade One event to run in a Grade Two contest at Kempton Park on 27 December.
Un De Sceaux is top-priced at 4-6 with Coral to beat a field which could also include Vibrato Valtat, the winner of the Henry VIII Novice Chase over course and distance on the same card last year. Paul Nicholls’s grey is a 7-2 chance for Saturday’s race, while Simonsig, who has made just one start over hurdles since taking the Arkle Trophy at Cheltenham in March 2013, is 7-1 and Sir De Grugy, the 2014 Champion Chase winner, is 10-1.
In all, there are 10 possible runners in the Tingle Creek, but Josses Hill and his stablemate Simonsig also hold entries in the Peterborough Chase at Huntingdon the following day, as does Mick Channon’s Somersby.
The top four horses in the Tingle Creek betting all have at least one previous Grade One success to their name and the race promises to be a stern test for the exuberant front-runner Un De Sceaux, the winner of the Arkle Trophy earlier this year and already top-priced at just 13-8 for the 2016 Champion Chase.
Racegoers must wait for his much-anticipated first meeting with Sprinter Sacre, however, as Henderson will aim him instead for the Desert Orchid Chase at Kempton, the race in which he dramatically lost his unbeaten record over fences two years ago when he was pulled up with an irregular heartbeat. A head-to-head between Un De Sceaux and Sprinter Sacre may now be delayed until the Champion Chase in March, for which Sprinter Sacre is currently second-favourite at 4-1.
“I talked to Caroline Mould [the owner of Sprinter Sacre] over the weekend,” Henderson said in a blog on the Stan James betting site on Monday.
“He’s in really, really good form but, having got him into good shape and the right place, he just doesn’t need another race at the moment and it’s as simple as that.
“The Desert Orchid at Kempton is the likely place for him and if he needs another run before Cheltenham [in March], fine.
“The Shloer [Chase, at Cheltenham, where Sprinter Sacre won for the first time since April 2013] was only three weeks ago and he has come out of it really well.
“It would be a hard race if Un De Sceaux ran and a hard race in soft ground is not what we want on top of a really good run like that. We don’t need to run him again. We’re not going to learn anything.”
Aintree racecourse attempted to dispel speculation surrounding the sponsorship of the Grand National on Monday, following a report in the Racing Post which suggested that Crabbie’s will not renew its support of the race when its current contract expires are this season’s running in April 2016.
“We are discussing the future sponsorship of the Crabbie’s Grand National with Halewood International,” John Baker, who is in charge of Aintree in his role as north-west regional director of Jockey Club racecourses, said on Monday. “[We are] two runnings into a contracted three-year agreement, and no decisions have been made by either party about rights from 2017 at this stage.”
