Espying Katie Walsh at Newbury with a ride for Nicky Henderson, I couldn’t help recalling one bookie’s reaction to the finish of the gruelling four-mile National Hunt Chase for amateurs at this year’s Cheltenham when she and Nina Carberry finished first and second, both earning bans for overuse of the ‘persuader’. ‘Birds first and second,’ he rasped. ‘And what about the way they used those whips?’ ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ a gent in a camel-hair coat next to me had echoed, dreamily turning an excited shade of pink. It takes all sorts, even in a racing crowd.
Post-Festival life at Newbury, too, was a reminder of racing’s talent for renewal. OK, so neither Kauto Star nor Denman won, but in Imperial Commander we have a horse who can beat anything on the Cheltenham track. Trainer Nigel Twiston-Davies, who scores his successes unpropelled by massive financial firepower and who paraded Imperial Commander that weekend in a scorched duffel coat he had rescued from the fire, will remember the day just as much from the way his 17-year-old son Sam won the Foxhunters on Baby Run. At Newbury, Sam rode another canny race up against the pros on Banjaxed Girl.
Part of the newer Cheltenham furniture, too, is Donald McCain. His noisier father Ginger may have won four Grand Nationals but he never trained a Festival winner. Donald notched his third and fourth with Ballabriggs and the exciting Peddler’s Cross. The Cheshire trainer scored a swift double at Newbury, too, with Riptide and the gutsy mare Double Hit, the first of them ridden by this season’s revelation, Jason Maguire.
Racing partnerships are all about loyalty and confidence. Just as Nigel Twiston-Davies and Paddy Brennan have struck up a partnership that has boosted both, so have McCain and Maguire, who was riding his 90th winner of the season on Riptide and is on target for his first ton.
Says Maguire of McCain: ‘I’m part of the team so there’s no real pressure. I’m not tied down.’ Says McCain of Maguire: ‘It’s one part I just don’t have to worry about any more. We get on as friends. He’s top-class. There’s AP and after him there’s no one better than Jason. He gives everything 110 per cent.’
What impresses about Jason is the realist’s air of calm. He doesn’t try to ride at less than 10st 5lb, saying, ‘I wouldn’t be a massive fan of starving’ because he knows the weakening effects of such self-torture. Any regrets among past rides? ‘I tend not to look back.’ Who has taught him the most? ‘My own mistakes.’
Jason has a useful second string to his bow, riding the Irish raiders sent over by another friend, Gordon Elliott. Watch for them on the Scottish summer circuit. When the McCoys and Johnsons one day move on we will hear much more about Jason Maguire.
The still very much on-the-ball Richard Johnson stole a race with a scorching front-running effort on Outside the Box for Noel Chance. ‘I had to give him the ride because he’s got an expensive wife,’ said the trainer. ‘I ought to know. I’m married to her mother.’ Sagely, he observed, after the field had failed to get to Outside the Box, ‘You can give weight, but you can’t give distance.’
Also noted on my Newbury card was a patient, sensible victory on Ryde Back by Nicky Henderson’s 7lb-claimer D.Bass, whose trainer has nicknamed him ‘C.Bass’.(Something fishy here, ed.)
Felix de Giles and Richard Killoran have both worked through their allowances so the canny Henderson asked his younger assis- tants to tap into the grapevine for a new claimer. David Bass, who came from John Manners, impressed the team with his efforts on some uninspiring mounts at the end of last season. At Seven Barrows they quietly realised they had something and David Bass’s second on French Opera at the Festival confirmed it. ‘He’s very tidy,’ said Nicky, who can see a potential conditional champion. He will be looking to preserve that seven-pound claim for when it matters: ‘You don’t want to be wasting it all in sellers.’
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