Robin Oakley

He knew a swan from a duck: remembering Andy Turnell

[PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo]

You don’t always have to win to enjoy it. At the end of the £100,000 Paddy Power Imperial Cup at Sandown on Saturday the exhilarated 7lb claimer Archie Bellamy jumped off Lively Citizen with a grin on his face you could have driven a car through. ‘I got some spin off that,’ he declared. ‘You’re turning in and he just takes off. I had such a lot of fun out there.’ So he had, riding a well-judged race on the 28-1 shot to take the lead two out and keeping on well. Lively Citizen’s handler David Jeffreys, who trains at Hinton on the Green, Worcestershire, proved almost equally chuffed: ‘He’s a real trainer’s horse,’ he beamed. ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve and gives you everything. He’s so good for the yard.’ So he had been but as Lively Citizen struck the front there was a spelling mistake sitting on his shoulder.

Ridden on his 21st birthday by James Bowen, who has this season completed the transition from teenage wunderkind to dependable top race jockey, Suprise Package sailed past Lively Citizen on the uphill run-in to triumph by a clear nine lengths. Without a win in his previous seven races, only ninth at Leopardstown on his previous run and allotted 6lb more by the English handicapper than he would have carried at home, Suprise Package is trained in Monasterevin, Ireland, by Peter Fahey and when David Jeffreys admiringly declared, ‘Bloody Irish – I hope this isn’t a sign of what’s to come next week,’ he voiced the thoughts of virtually every English racegoer present.

By the time most read this column, thanks to publishing schedules, the Cheltenham Festival will be almost over and many of the home team who suffered a 23-5 trouncing by Irish horses at last year’s festival fear that the statistics could make equally disastrous reading this year.

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