On the surface, with some magical racing at Kempton’s Christmas festival still fresh in the memory, there is not much wrong with jump racing. But one of the last acts of the British Horseracing Authority in 2015 was to publish a review of jump racing which contained 41 recommendations for improvements in the sport including the race programme, prize money, the horse population, participation and ownership.
Well, if Coneygree’s stirring victory in the Cheltenham Gold Cup last March, when he became the first novice to win it for 41 years, did not help spread the word about the joys of syndicate ownership, then we are all struggling.
The horse, bred from a mare called Plaid Maid, was bought for £5,000 to give the late Lord Oaksey, amateur rider and, for years, racing correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, a bit of amusement in retirement. It was owned by a syndicate of 12 people called the Max (the horse’s stable name) Partnership made up of Oaksey family, involved as much out of a sense of duty to John as anything, and friends.
That happy day at Cheltenham Coneygree came home a length and a half clear of Djakadam, owned by Rich Ricci, a man who would not blink at spending £500,000 on a horse and had dominated Cheltenham to that point, and trained by Willie Mullins, who had had eight winners at the meeting to that point, almost as many winners as the Bradstocks have horses.
This was a modern-day sporting David versus Goliath perpetuating the dream which underpins the sport. At the time the Bradstocks’ small string included Coneygree’s two brothers Carruthers and Flintham, but the easier option would have been to run their tall eight-year-old in the novice equivalent of the Gold Cup at Cheltenham, the RSA Chase.
“There were two things,” Sara Bradstock said this week, reflecting on the decision to go for Gold. “When he won the Feltham Chase at Kempton over Christmas by 40 lengths a few of the other fancied runners had fallen. People thought he might have been a bit lucky. But Nico de Boinville told us afterwards that he had spoken to the other jockeys, who said that they had only fallen because Coneygree had been going so fast in front. That made us think we ought at least to enter him for the Gold Cup.”
She added: “With 10 horses in the yard and nothing else as good as him, it is a job to gauge a horse’s true ability sometimes, and one of the clinchers came in his next start, in the Denman Chase at Newbury, when he beat Houblon des Obeaux seven lengths. Venetia William came over to say well done in the winner’s enclosure. Before she turned and went she passed on the information that Aidan Coleman, her jockey, had dismounted pronouncing he had just been beaten by the Gold Cup winner. That conversation gave us the confidence to go for the Gold Cup.”
Another prescient factor influencing their decision to take the bold route, given that Coneygree ended 2015 on box rest and ruled out of a defence of his title with a hock injury, was the horse’s fragility. “At the time there were a lot of people were saying there’s next year for the Gold Cup,” Bradstock said. “But we’ve just proved there isn’t. He has incredibly long hind-legs which deliver all his power and he’d had a year off with hind-leg problems before. He was also eight and, although the runner-up was not a novice, he was actually six so we weren’t exactly the spring chicken in the race.”
The irony of his injury is that of all the contenders for his now-vacant title, his return at Sandown last month was perhaps the most impressive. He beat a horse 25 lengths which subsequently trotted up in the Tommy Whittle Chase at Haydock. His greatness, let us hope, is only temporarily stable-bound.
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