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Tip top, Bobby. Four excellent selections placed at very good odds. Out on a high! Congratulations.
Excellent faith in the lost cause, VtC! (I thought it was Fr Gilligansvoyage, but it is voyge.) When I saw it had won in 2023 on the same going, etc, I thought it was worth following (for four places) (SP on Skybet). Paid for my losses today.
Great stuff, VtC. Did you go for Dedicated Hero, in the end? Kap Vert was a great price at SP. I haven’t been following much recently and when I looked at the field for the National, I thought that they all could win. Kim Roque keeps being almost there. Joe fancied Katate Dori and I thought it was lining up to win, but it fell back. Congrats again.
Did you get 33s? Big Gossey is a favourite of ours and it was fab to see him dig in and leave them all trailing!
Richard 88 “The implication is that it primarily happens amongst Muslims although quite why anyone in Reform thinks that Muslim women would vote for them if their husbands didn’t force them to vote for someone else is beyond me.”
Yes, I am sure those Muslim families were really desperate to vote for the racist who threatens to deport millions of immigrants and were forced to vote for a party whose leader is the openly Jewish, indeed changing his name from Paulden to Polanski to acknowledge his family origins.
Reform will invent any kind of sinister untruth that suits their purposes and no doubt their hardcore followers will believe it, just as the MAGA halfwits do in the USA.
Meanwhile BBC is doing its best to undermine the Green Party spokespeople with Nick Robinson constantly interrupting while nodding deferentially to Reform’s.
Is it the pride of an old man which will bring about the end of a great champion? For a year, Constitution Hill has been telling Nicky Henderson the same thing, but he will not listen. He seems incapable of accepting that a great champion serial winner at the highest level can unexpectedly develop a catastrophic fault. His response to something which is beyond his experience is denial. Any objective viewing of Constitution Hill’s three falls reveals a horse which has lost its confidence altogether. In the last race at Newcastle, he only managed one hurdle and fell at the second.
After the first fall at Cheltenham last year it was not unreasonable to believe that that was a one-off an event that can happen out of the blue for an unknown cause. But the second fall at Aintree was confirmation that something was seriously amiss. That third and last fall was a flashing red light.
“no other champ has had as many falls over hurdles in their entire career as he has had this year.” That was Chris Cook trying to explain it all in the Racing Post last December.
https://www.racingpost.com/news/the-front-runner/how-the-mighty-have-fallen-has-any-champion-lost-their-love-for-jumping-quite-like-constitution-hill-agRny4F7gOGo/
In that article he did go on to cite Istabraq’s two falls at the end of his career, at about the same age as Constitution Hill.Great actors can suffer from stage fright, which means they cannot perform. There is no explanation and for most it passes away after a time. For some, it is career ending. When it happened to Laurence Olivier, he went to the front of the stage and said, “I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, I have been taken ill”. There is a long list of well known actors and performers, Hugh Grant, Alison Steadman, Stephen Fry, Barbra Streisand, Ian Holm, Lenny Henry, Juliet Stevenson, Tim Roth, etc.
Horses are sentient beings and we do not really know how they perceive themselves or the world. A trainer told me that when a horse has a bleed, it frightens it and it does not forget it. He said that those horses are never the same afterwards. Many comments here refer to the white topped, padded hurdles as a factor. That may be true and may be related to something that Constitution Hill once experienced, its perception, vision, judgement, any one of many unknown factors.
Constitution Hill has, for whatever unknown reason, then, developed a disastrous mindset about jumping hurdles. However many it jumps at Seven Barrows in training makes no difference. Unless Nicky Henderson can discover, incontrovertibly, what is causing Constitution Hill to make these elementary mistakes at hurdles in races, he would be wrong and foolhardy and more, to put the horse through what must be a nightmare for it again. There is a terrible risk that it could end in a tragedy that is not worth taking.
The horse is telling Henderson the same thing each time. He must listen and accept that there are some things about horses that have no explanation and which even he, the master of seven barrows, cannot remedy. He should be wise enough to know that.
Constitution Hill has surely given enough to its owner, Henderson and indeed to all of us who revere it.
Great selection there with Holly Bird! Those races where the selection goes well clear in the last furlong are special. Sandy Thomson had prepared it well.
I wonder if the faith in Willy Mullins’s enthusiastic judgement led backers to overlook the obvious risks, risks that the going increased. Then there was (I think) Pricewise picking out Captain Cody. Last year, the winner, Nick Rockett, was similarly heavily supported generally, but the grounds for that support were far more firmly based in terms of form, ratings and speed.
Am I wrong in thinking that the multiple attempts to get a (fair) start (six or seven?) were more than likely to produce a random result. Townend arrived towards the end of the first grouping, presumably to try to find a good start, but it became anything but straightforward. I did not see what led to him being unseated. I guess that it was out of his hands.
Given the going, there were so many horses which had a real chance and I think that the betting overall did reflect that, with a significant number of runners in a relatively narrow band. The winner was well within that band.
A very close call, Joe, very bad luck. I think if Catch Catchfire had not faltered at the last two fences, he would have won. Tom
Inspired selection there, on Imperial Saint. When I saw your post the price had long gone and it was 10s on Saturday morning. However, I see in the Racing Post that they are attributing the “huge gamble” to Pricewise, though admitting no-one is sure where it came from. Mean of them not to give you credit there! What was it that caught your attention, or was it just that the combination of form, trainer, race selection, going, etc, etc, which gave you some intuition? I did not back it, but I fell into the Royal Pagaille groove, convinced that Venetia’s form must turn soon…Puts me in mind of Steeplechasing’s post about the somewhat mysterious ups and downs of stables which can be caused by viruses or after effects of vaccinations, but sometimes the known factors are absent and there is an unknown factor putting the hex on the horses. I think Steeplechasing was looking at the need for research into contaminated hay.
Well done again! I wondered what had happened when the price fell through the floor, I was certain it was going to be withdrawn. I actually didn’t realize it had been placed until I saw the payout on Skybet. Your instinct was correct. Made up for yesterday, maybe, when the withdrawal stymied your Ike Sport.
That was a tough outcome! That arrow that you sent off last January scored effectively an outer gold, half a length behind the leading three sharing noses. That’s no consolation, but immense kudos, nonetheless.
Had Willy Mullins put just one of either Gaelic Warrior or Fact to File in the John Durkan, then today’s race might have seen a different outcome. Looking back, they had no reason to be beating the living kapok out of each other. The nearest to either was 30 lengths behind. None of the other horses had races as demanding prior to today. Will that be a lesson for the future, I wonder? It was a great and unforgettable spectacle at Punchestown, but which is the greater prize?
