Quite a few of the races this week have had a sense of inevitability about them as yet another Willie Mullins-trained, Ruby Walsh-ridden rocket cruised to the lead and that was never more true than in the case of Vautour, the horse who should have been running in Friday’s Gold Cup. Dropped at short notice into the shorter, easier Ryanair Chase, this powerful beast romped round to score by a very comfortable six lengths.
Any horse achieving success at a third consecutive Festival ought to be an occasion for celebration but some of the air was taken out of this balloon by his controversial reassignment on Tuesday morning, after months in which the horse’s owner, Rich Ricci, had insisted the Gold Cup was his target. And it seemed here that Ricci had some lingering regret about the volte-face, describing this victory as “an odd feeling”.
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to win at Cheltenham,” he said. “But, with all the furore, and my new nickname, Switch Ricci ... I’m disappointed. I want the horse to run in a Gold Cup in one sense. In another sense I’m delighted.”
Pressed once more about whether he “felt bad” for punters who had lost money backing Vautour for the Gold Cup, Ricci said: “Of course you do. You don’t want to disappoint punters but you can’t have it all ways. I try to be as open and as honest as I can and say what I think. Sometimes you’re going to get it wrong and I hope people will forgive me.”
Mullins discussed the reasons behind his decision – for it certainly was his decision and not Ricci’s – to run Vautour in the Ryanair. “I think he’s a Gold Cup horse,” the trainer said, but added: “He wasn’t working like a Gold Cup horse.
“He was the same last year and this was a bigger task. Last year I came here on a wing and a prayer and I came here the same this year. We did what we did last year. It wasn’t working on him.
“I completely changed the way we train him. I changed the way we ride him, the tack he wears and I trained him out the field. I didn’t put him in a stable. The only stable he’s been in, the last 10 days, are the two nights here. I brought him here very late and it was all last-minute. We had to try something different because what we were doing wasn’t working.” Mullins feels the new regime, plus some sunshine and a drying racecourse helped produce this impressive performance from Vautour. But asked if he therefore regretted pulling the horse out of the Gold Cup, which the trainer has never won, he said: “No, I’m delighted I made the switch. Because he won.”
As we saw with Quevega, Mullins is perfectly happy to run some horses below their level if it means they can win a nice pot and avoid clashes with stablemates, so that Walsh can ride as many of them as possible. Delaying decisions until the point where they simply must be made is also classic Mullins behaviour, which should perhaps have prepared us for Tuesday’s news. Ricci will presumably be more guarded in his future comments and punters will certainly be more careful about acting on them.
Even so, there was no evidence of ill feeling from racegoers towards this victory. It was quite the opposite, in fact, as Vautour’s thousands of backers in the stands hailed his jockey with chants of “Roo-bee! Roo-bee! Roo-bee!”
There was a much less happy ending for anyone who backed Zabana in the opening JLT Novice Chase. The Irish raider was broadside to the tape when the starter, Robbie Supple, unaccountably let the nine-runner field go, with the result that Davy Russell was unseated by Zabana whipping round to follow the others.
As has been seen before, the British Horseracing Authority wants to hold everyone to account except itself and its own officials. Jamie Stier, its director of regulation, said Supple was not to blame because “things happen very quickly down at the start”.
Indeed Stier preferred to point the finger at Russell, saying: “When the starter calls them to line up for a standing start, they’re meant to face forward and be ready. Davy, because he wished to be on the outside, commenced to turn his horse, so yes, that did play a part.”
But Zabana was clearly facing the wrong way at the point when Supple activated the tape. Nor was he the only horse moving at the time of what was supposed to be a standing start. Supple is a veteran starter, respected by jockeys, but he got this one wrong and the refusal of his employers to acknowledge that is baffling.
