Sandown waterlogged yet Kempton just a few miles away is a mixture of good to soft and soft tells its own story.
Yes the King George can be run at Sandown but it still turns it into much more of a stamina test (especially on winter ground) and if you watch the finish of One Man’s win that was the first sign I ever saw of him going up and down on the same spot on the run in and I am convinced he went into the red zone that day and never forgot it.
One Man had already won a Hennessy over the Gold Cup trip a year before that King George but subsequently to that King George he always hit that wall (especially at Cheltenham) when he came off the bridle after 3m, whilst Kicking King was a much stronger stayer as he actually won a Gold Cup. The days of the good 2½m horse trying to step up to the 3m trip I think would be a thing of the past if the race went to Sandown.
Also what is to stop the Jockey Club from potentially neglecting Sandown like it did to Kempton? I also don’t think that Sandown’s hurdles course in particular (where it merges with the flat course) can take many more added fixtures especially given the over watering the flat course gets during the flat season, Kempton with its AW track doesn’t suffer from that issue, which would in part explain why it would be more likely to have better ground than Sandown in general to.
Had the Jockey Club actually supported Kempton in similar ways to what they have done at both Aintree/Cheltenham (I invested in the JC’s Bond Scheme when they worked on the redevelopment of Cheltenham – a similar thing potentially could have been done to redevelop Kempton too) the sport surely wouldn’t find itself in this predicament now.
They fact that once the Kempton sale got massive blowback from all quarters, they quietly behind the scenes went ahead and sold off the option rights to Barrett Redrow and conveniemtly said nothing to anyone until it got inadvertantly blurted out with the infamous line of ‘the sale of Kempton is out of our hands now’ some 7-8 years later tells you just how transparent the JC is.