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Dan Skelton is obviously going all guns to win the trainers championship but to what end? After the Betfair Chase he said Grey Dawning needed a rest but here he is entered for the King George apparently all fine. Am I misreading this?
He has already run twice as many horses as his closest rival Paul Nicholls but is only £400k ahead.The more I know the less I understand.
Fair play to Grey Dawning if he wins The King George after a slog in the Haydock mud under 5 weeks before.
I wouldn’t trust anything any of them say- mostly making it up as they go along.
Trainer yesterday said pre-race a horse they have running in a 2mile 4 f event would likely benefit from a step up to 3 miles next and trying to stay on from the back. Jockey gets off the horse after the race and says it probably wants dropping back down to 2 miles and making the running.
guesswork
Give Dan a break.
Most horses will need a rest after a hard race like Grey Dawning had at Haydock. So Dan was entitled to say he’d need a rest when speaking immediately after Haydock. However, some horses recover quicker from hard races than others. Maybe what the trainer has seen at home since then suggests he’s fully recovered… With the emphasis on “SUGGESTS”. Horses are not trained at full speed at home, so even the best trainers cannot be certain and sometimes get it wrong. Equally, trainers are entitled to change their minds about horses after the evidence of the race itself. Just as punters are. Trainers can believe a horse has recovered from its previous run and then after a disappointing run say “he hadn’t recovered”.
Races like the King George don’t come around very often and the best of the Irish are seemingly staying at home. So the race could be easier to win than many Grade 1 staying chases this season. Between the KG and GC in Britain there is only races like the Cotswold and Denman as alternatives anyway. Races with nowhere near the prestige (and money) of this race… And plenty of time to recover for Cheltenham. So I can understand GD’s connections taking a chance on both being ready and the right-handed track.
Grey Dawning running adds to the race. In fact I applaud them for having a go.
Value Is EverythingTo be honest, I think Dan running so many early is paying dividends… In that he’s already so far clear of Willie Mullins that – despite saying he’ll have a good go – last year’s Champion Trainer doesn’t seem to be be particularly trying to retain the trophy. Otherwise I feel sure he’d be running something good here, as well as the Betfair and a greater go at the Coral Gold Cup etc. Only really the latter handicap result that’s kept Nicholls within touching distance… And he doesn’t seem to have the Grade 1 ammunition of Skelton, so I don’t really see Paul challenging.
Value Is EverythingGrey Dawning needed a longer rest after the betfair but no longer does as Gaelic Warrior isn’t running so it will be an easier race for him now
Charles Darwin to conquer the World
Only way he can win the title is by having the sheer number of winners (Nicholls in recent years was the same when he didn’t really have the firepower to win a host of the top G1 races) and then you just hope that Willie doesn’t repeat last year’s triumphs in winning the Champion Hurdle/Gold Cup/National and a host of other big races in the UK which offset the many more wins with lower prize money.
Re Grey Dawning – I felt it was a little silly/knee jerk to be saying he won’t run again before Christmas after Haydock, yes he had a hard race but horses are more than capable of backing up in another race a month to 6 weeks or so later (sometimes with an even shorter rest period). Trainers get it into their head that horses can’t do this or can’t do that when in fact the opposite is most likely true and it is just their own fears stopping them from running them more often and giving them a chance to prove them wrong……trainers can be very much creatures of habit especially if they just happen to say just have one or two prep runs (in specific races) and then win a big G1 race. It becomes a rinse and repeat process until it stops working and then they tend to come out and say that maybe they should have been running them more often instead
Maybe if they ran these good horses a bit more often they would be more battle hardened and wouldn’t take longer to recover from a single hard race or pick up issues sitting at home in their boxes twiddling their hoofs – trainers can get their horses that much fitter first time out than in the past and as such we see many more horses winning first time out off massive breaks than we ever did back in the day (where the general rule of thumb was that you get a horse fit enough to do themselves justice first time out and then run them more often after that to get them properly match fit).
Yes there will be some horses that respond better to the softly softly approach of infrequent runs (Best Mate and Al Boum Photo immediately spring to mind) but it isn’t a one solution to fit all horses just because it worked with one horse – Dessie and Kauto both won their respective 1st King George’s on their 4th run of the season (Kauto in fact won the Betfair and two weeks later went and won the Tingle Creek!!!).
For me Grey Dawning’s obvious next port of call after Haydock should be Kempton (its a no brainer really) and if he does blow out then you have plenty of time to freshen him up again for Cheltenham in March…..but then again if he does blow out against the likely opposition at Kempton does he really have any business being considered as a Gold Cup candidate in the first place.
Tbf Dan said this straight after the race. He was interviewed the week after and said he couldn’t believe how well GD had come out of the race and was bouncing.
Why not take your chance in one of the biggest races of the season.
Can’t win with some folk. Horses not running enough. Horses running too often
Danger for him by running so many so often is he ruins a few on the way to the glory of the title.
Grey Dawning is a fantastic horse. Were he trained by Mullins though do you think he’d be going anywhere near Kempton (not that he’d have run at Haydock either if he were)?
And if I were the handicapper – every time Langer Dan runs this season and finished out the frame I’d be putting him UP a few lbs each time. If he finished out the back I’d be putting him up a few more.
“Kauto in fact won the Betfair and two weeks later went and won the Tingle Creek!!!”
Quite a feat that LD73
Nearly put Langer Dan up as my villain on the TRF awards.
The more I know the less I understand.
Some of the comments on this thread demonstrate how severely things have changed in Jumps racing. A few decades ago, the idea of a top class horse turning out at regular intervals and running perhaps 6 or 7 times a season was entirely routine. Nowadays it seems to be viewed as an abnormality.
While I don’t approve of all Skelton’s actions, I hope his more ambitious approach pays off.
Exactly that Marlingford :good:. If he weren’t running them often he be called like other trainers, dammed if they do dammed if they don’t
VF x
“Danger for him by running so many so often is he ruins a few on the way to the glory of the title.
Grey Dawning is a fantastic horse. Were he trained by Mullins though do you think he’d be going anywhere near Kempton (not that he’d have run at Haydock either if he were)?”I agree by and large with these sentiments. Doing too much too soon runs the risk of ruining a horse in the longer term. He’s young enough to take in the King George another year if he turns out Gold Cup class this year. If i owned him, seeing him finish like that in the Betfair Chase, i’d want to go Denman Chase next and, depending on what he achieves there, the Cheltenham target can be discussed. I’d say to Skelton i appreciate your going for the trainer’s title but i saw what happened in the Betfair Chase and i wanna wait with mine.
Were he to run in the King George, try hard, and disappoint we won’t know if he’s still Gold Cup class or didn’t get over the Haydock race.
I saw the Dessie and Kauto Star examples/comparisons. They done good but their runs before weren’t on heavy ground and legless at the finish.
I noticed btw in Dessies Career 28 of his 32 starts were on GF/G/GS ground.
Agree marlingford, run them as often as you can, as long as they are sound and can do themselves justice they should be running.
Personally I just ignore what trainers say- watch the videos, study the form, make your own mind up.
“I agree by and large with these sentiments. Doing too much too soon runs the risk of ruining a horse in the longer term”.
————————Racehorses tend to progress their form in relation to the amount of experience they have. So even the best novices are usually given a few runs before Cheltenham in order to reach the level of ability required to win a top novice chase… But also, one that has had a lot of racing as a novice chaser usually reaches its pinnacle in form sooner and so cannot be expected to improve much in its second year. So I can understand if a top handicapper does not have that many runs in a season, in order to keep the horse unexposed – likely to improve past its mark. However, a Grade 1 horse races off level weights. The sooner it gets to its maximum form level in its second season the better – the more races it is able to win. Once a Grade 1 horse has got to it’s maximum level of ability, there is no “ruining a horse in the long term”. It just maintains the level. (Although yes, the more racing it has the more likely it is to fall and / or get injured. So keeping it sound would be a bigger issue).
However, if Grey Dawning is to win the Gold Cup then the more runs he has as a second season chaser the better his chance is likely to be. His form needs to improve by over a stone to win a good Gold Cup. With the horses around at the moment, it is probably going to need an exceptional performance to win it… And the vast majority of progressive racehorses improve with racing. Asking Grey Dawning to produce over a stone improvement in one go this season is asking a hell of a lot, two runs a bit less, after three or preferably four runs a Gold Cup winning performance is more likely.
Value Is Everything
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