The Wagnerian tenor Lauritz Melchior was supposed to conclude an operatic scene one night by leaping upon a mechanical swan gliding across the stage. Unfortunately the appointed swan arrived, and departed, before he had concluded the key aria. More than a little miffed by the failings of the production team, Melchior turned to the audience and inquired acidly, ‘Anybody know the time of the next swan?’
I too have a fairly spectacular missed-bus problem. Although most readers will not see this article before Friday or Saturday, The Spectator’s production schedule requires the copy to be delivered on a Monday. This offering cannot therefore reflect on jump racing’s major event of the year, this week’s Cheltenham Festival. Apologies, but at least the events at Sandown last Saturday gave us a heady advance whiff of the brew we will hopefully have been savouring this week in the Cotswolds — good winners from Nicky Henderson and David Pipe, a master class in jockeyship from Tony McCoy and a well-celebrated Irish coup.
Trainer Paul Nolan brought over Golden Sunbird from County Wexford for the mares bumper (a Flat race confined to National Hunt horses) and bookmakers’ wires were soon humming with news of how much money was flooding on her the other side of the water. With Tony McCoy booked after Golden Sunbird had won her only other race back home under a 7lb-claimer the 6–1 available early on seemed generous and the good-looking chestnut came home comfortably ahead of Lucy Wadham’s useful Kentucky Sky.
I found myself caught up among celebrating members of the Banjo Syndicate as the contestants came back along the horsewalk and the whooping and hugging that went on among impeccable tweeds, dog-eared anoraks and City coats made it clear that the money had been down. The syndicate, mostly it seems retired tailors from Dublin, are lucky owners. They previously campaigned the very useful Accordion Etoile and, since Golden Sunbird’s family background includes winners like Alexander Banquet, Gold Cup victor Looks Like Trouble and Grand National star Silver Birch, they should have plenty more celebrating to come in the years ahead. Golden Sunbird’s canny trainer plans to put her away now to preserve her novice status but watch out for her next year.
You should never underestimate the Irish, who originated the concept, in a bumper. Their side of the water, as a friend with connections in Co. Carlow reminded me, there is as much discussion of the country’s prospects in the Festival Bumper as there is of Ireland’s hopes in the Gold Cup or the Champion Hurdle, and they usually centre around the entries made by champion trainer Willie Mullins, who has won the race six times since 1996. My informant insisted that trials under differing weights indicated that Mullins’s leading entry this year, Sicilian Secret, was a stone ahead of anything else. By the time you read this we will know.
Golden Sunbird’s Sandown contest, incidentally, was entitled ‘The European Breeders Fund/Doncaster Bloodstock Sales Mares Standard Open National Hunt Flat Race Final Listed Race Class 1’. You can understand the sponsors’ needs but it did bring to mind the advice we had from a leading marketing expert at the spring forum of the British Horseracing Authority three weeks ago, that one of the problems racing has to struggle with in reaching a wider audience with its product is simplifying the language involved. The sport, he warned, will remain a well-kept secret until it stops speaking in an ‘alien tongue’.
David Pipe won the Sandown opener with Big Eared Fran, a horse whose prospects he certainly hadn’t tried to cloud when we were invited to the yard to meet his Cheltenham prospects. It would have been nice, too, to see Deep Purple win the novices chase for his currently not-so-well owner Paul Green. Sadly, Evan Williams’s jumper was coolly and clinically cut down after the last, as McCoy concluded a treble by choosing just the moment to press the button on Song of Songs. The champion doesn’t score all his victories by relentless driving.
The horse who really caught the eye, though, was Dave’s Dream, the runaway 7-length winner of the Paddy Power Imperial Cup. Trainer Nicky Henderson, who last won the race as an amateur rider aboard Acquaint in 1978, was left with a dilemma. Should he seek the £75,000 bonus from the sponsors available if Dave’s Dream were to win a race at Cheltenham, too, or would that be one risk too many with a young horse who has had his problems?
It was, he conceded, a nice dilemma to have. In the ultimate accolade from one of his experience, Nicky insisted of the talented Dave’s Dream: ‘He’s a proper horse.’ The master of Seven Barrows is not one usually for purple prose, so those words should be heeded. I might even see what price is to be had for the Gold Cup in 2011 and 2012.
The ‘old firm’ of Henderson and Fitzgerald, Nicky and his long-time stable jockey Mick Fitzgerald, have a brother to Dave’s Dream sitting in the Lambourn yard, at that point without an owner. That sounds like the answer to financing a holiday when the rigours of Cheltenham, Aintree and Punchestown have passed, and a good one at that. As the trainer noted, ‘The price might just have gone up.’
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