Here is one for the experts at pub-quiz racing nights: which well-known jumps trainer has scored twice at Royal Ascot without yet registering training a winner at the Cheltenham Festival? Answer: Paul Webber. His glorious Cropredy Lawn yard near Banbury turns out a stream of decent hurdlers and chasers most winters — think of Flying Instructor, De Soto and Imperial Cup winner Carlo Brigante — but never seems to have much luck at the Festival. Meanwhile, from his comparatively rare forays on the Flat Paul can point to Royal Ascot victories on the Flat both with Ulundi (who also won a Scottish Champion Hurdle) and Full House.
In March this year, 99 per cent of the racing world was convinced that things were going to change. The leading novice chaser Time For Rupert, an imposing chestnut gelding by Flemensfirth, was the heaviest-backed horse at the Festival in the RSA chase. He had won at Cheltenham in November and December. But that day he ran without his usual zest, could manage no better than fifth place and was later found to have suffered lung damage from an infection that had prevented him running in January.
His trainer, one of the cheeriest, best-tempered figures you will meet on the racecourse, took the defeat with grace at the time, but with that Festival hoodoo hanging over him it must have hurt. This season the Festival will be Time For Rupert’s focus. Lung problems are behind him and when I went to see him before his planned seasonal debut in the Charlie Hall Chase at Wetherby (where he finished second to Weird Al) he looked an absolute picture, both on the gallops and after the swim which habitually follows the horses’ exercise at Cropredy. I only need to see him on a bicycle and I would happily back him for a triathlon.
(His trainer, in his days as a bloodstock agent, once triumphed when he, former jockey Bill Smith and racing manager Angus Gold were roped in for an impromptu bicycle race staged at their Gainsborough stud in the US by the Maktoum brothers who were bored during a lull in the Keeneland yearling sales. ‘We were,’ he says, ‘kind of substitute camels for the day.’ But I understand the prize was worth having, coming in at rather more than the average Catterick seller.)
Time For Rupert’s second to the outstanding Big Buck’s in the 2010 World Hurdle at the Festival was good enough to have won the long distance hurdlers’ title most years. He is a resolute stayer with a good cruising speed and the day I saw him Paul was insisting ‘hopefully we haven’t squeezed the lemon yet’.
There is a friendly buzz around Cropredy Lawn and it is symptomatic of the individual attention paid to the inmates of its 63 boxes that their dens are labelled not just with the horses’ racecard names but also with the less formal titles they go by in the yard. Thus Edgbriar is ‘Toby’, Tindaro is ‘Freddie’ and Guest of Honour is ‘Raymond’ (because Paul’s only ever ride in the Grand National was on a horse owned by Raymond Guest).
One intriguing inmate, who goes by the name of ‘Pablo’, is the five-year-old brown gelding Icy Colt who had caught my eye at Cheltenham’s Showcase meeting. Icy Colt was bred in Argentina, where there is no racing over obstacles, and yet Paul says he is one of the most natural jumpers he has ever handled. Argentinian horses have lately been in demand for the Flat in places like Dubai and it would be interesting to see more racing here over jumps, although Paul concedes they are likely to be top of the ground summer specialists.
A truly exciting performer in every sense is the fizzy grey Australia Day. He may have failed to add to the stable’s Royal Ascot total when he ran in the Ascot Stakes but he won a summer hurdle at Market Rasen without coming off the bridle and then broke the two-mile track record at Kempton. Racing back at the Sunbury track on 16 October, in only his second steeplechase, he took his fences like a stag and won by 51 lengths in the hands of Denis O’Regan who is now riding for the yard along with the regulars Dominic Elsworth and Will Kennedy.
Elsworth made a fairy-tale comeback for Paul, winning on Edgbriar at Cheltenham last October after a 15-month lay-off with a head injury. The trainer rates him ‘as good as ever, though the bang on the head has had the advantage of making him more cheerful than he was’. Among the horses, others I liked included Tiagra, neatly named by four hopeful over-seventies, the well-made mare Alasi and Sarando, a Hernando gelding with four white socks who was second to the classy Quito de la Roque at Aintree in the spring.
Festival winners don’t come easily. It took David Nicholson 18 years and Josh Gifford 17 to train one. But a Cheltenham Festival report noting ‘winner trained P. Webber, Banbury’ is well overdue.
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