Champion Hurdle
They say you can’t keep a wily old dog down and how right they were about Conor O’Dwyer!
That’s three times now he has ridden his rivals to sleep in three champion hurdles on Hardy Eustace, two at Cheltenham and one at Leopardstown, and he dictated the AIG from start to finish on Sunday.
I think that the Racing Post’s Tom Segal made a very valid point when he said that because of the horses’ age connections have had him in peak form for each of his three races to date this season rather than building him up steadily for the Festival at the backend of the season and it has paid massive dividends once again, and indeed a massive compliment to Detroit City.
Brave Inca ran his usual 110% race, but even McCoy was outfoxed here, but there is no doubt in my mind on better ground the placings will be reversed in what will be a much faster run race or will it!?!?
For if O’Dwyer is allowed to dictate terms again then the other jockeys will just be falling into his deep pocket of resistance and I can’t believe that will happen. I suspect even McCoy will have learnt from this defeat and will ask his partner (if he rides Inca) to go about his business a lot earlier at Cheltenham.
I thought Jazz Messenger ran way too freely and his run can be safely consigned to the bin. He should also be much better off swinging off a faster pace and on better ground, while Iktitaf looked very dull in his coat and was never going to get to the leaders.
Gold Cup
Exotic Dancer, Gold Cup standard OR just a Cheltenham freak? Well there’s no crabbing the way he picked up for McCoy after being hunted around at the back of the pack for the Letherby and Christopher but what did he beat?
The answer is not an awful lot. He saw off a Pipe horse notorious for chucking it in and whose Wetherby victory has always been over rated. He beat a Welsh National winner that even on his preferred soft ground is way too slow to win a Gold Cup trial. And he beat a one paced plodder in Nil Desperandum whose form is far, far better at Aintree over the big fences.
I would go as far as to say that had Neptune Collonges stood up then the winner would have been hard pushed to land this contest by anything like the 18 lengths he ultimately did.
World Hurdle
Did Black Jack Ketchum’s failure in the Cleeve Hurdle bring to an end his air of invincibility or was it just a minor blip? To my mind I find it unbelievable that Jonjo actually ran the horse after publicly stating his star hurdler would hate the ground.
Before the race he knew that, McCoy knew it, the whole world knew it and still he ran Jack? It was no hindsight conclusion.
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