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He doesn’t have anything to find. Burdett Road, the horse he destroyed in the triumph was 2nd in the Champion Hurdle. That is literally the standard in the division. Nemean Lion nearly won the Fighting Fifth, lovely horse but thats not strong form. Lossie over 2M? Well her only relevant 2m form had her beating Burdett Road too but no more impressively than Golden Ace or Sir Gino did and she didnt even win the race.
I think she comes here now unless Anzadam improves a bit. I keep thinking back to the Annie Power year and he will do it if what he has isn’t enough. We forget in that year he still had Nichols Canyon who was a grade 1 winner over the trip, but if he’d relied on Nichols Canyon he probably would have lost to My Tent Or Yours and I say probably because Tent was as likely to finish 2nd to anything than win.
Anzadam needs to improve a lot. He wasn’t beaten far by the champion hurdle winner but she didn’t beat Winter Fog that far in the Champion Hurdle and that is the standard we’re working off here potentially. The bar is pretty low. If Sir Gino or somebody like that was put in they’d be close to favourite probably.
Sorry but there’s every chance poor CH ends up dead if they carry this on. Hes not even getting far into his races now
Probably an element of recency bias for Gstaad and fans of Ombudsman might argue the same for Calandagan. There wasn’t much in it because nobody really dominated either division unlike Trawlerman and Minnie Hauk. Delacroix you could argue either way for Field Of Gold but again recency and durability tipped it Delacroix’s way. Asfoora was the least worst option in the sprint category
I don’t like the way this sport is heading at all. Don’t they have enough on their plate with bad PR without basically turning into nightclub venues and all that entails live on ITV? They are being very naive if they don’t believe 95% of the people turning up won’t be completely off their faces. They might come back to a similar event but they arent suddenly going to fall in love with Racing when they are sober.
I said last season, if you can buiild up a big enough lead before then Mullins won’t even bother coming over for Ayr and Sandown. Dan needs to win as many of these Haldon Gold Cup, Schloer Chase, today etc as he can before there is a significant Irish challenge
I’ve always felt there should be two clearly defined seasons. No jumps after Sandown in UK, no flat after Doncaster or whatever the last meeting is. Scrap the summer jumps and scrap the sand racing. I’m between Newton Abbot (summer) and Exeter (winter) and the racing at Newton is diabolical most of the time, rarely a double digit field. Whereas Exeter get a couple of deecent meetings starting with the Haldon Gold Cup this week. If it rains in the summer for a week Newton Abbot lose half the meetings anyway.
Was just reading that he is named after Ricky Hatton so quite a poignant winner and the owners are donating the prize money to the Ricky Hatton Foundation. Nice touch all round
Rip Third Time Lucki
On another note feels wrong to include in the same post but there is a very lengthy stewards report on Unexpected Party from today which is not entirely surprising as he has previous for not raising a leg all season then growing an extra one in March at the festival
From what I gather the Gold Cup would stay on Friday, no plans to move it to Saturday. I’m not sure what they would move but presumably would mostly be races currently run on the New Course, although saying that they’ve moved courses for the Mares in 2026 by switching days
I have to ask what the pacemakers actually bought to the party again. It was another silly farce where they were both done miles out because they’d overdone it. There was a decent sized field there today, did any of them really need a pacemaker? I’ve always felt a really top horse with the right temperament and a good blend of attributes will win if they are on their game regardless of the setup of the race and yes Frankel had a pacemaker but he didn’t need it and he was a bit of a lunatic anyway so he doesn’t tick the temperament box. I don’t like these Goldilocks types who need it teeing up on a plate or they can’t win.
I’d revise what I said above actually about it not being a fair track. There isn’t a part of the track you want to be on necessarily I just think big fields and where the optimal pace is rather than a specific draw would be the crucial bit and its probably true of any straight track where there’s a big field. There was a bias at Haydock in the Sprint Cup too. You get a big field and they normally split and its in the lap of the horsey gods as to which group you want to be in and there’s no real way of knowing beforehand if you’ve had a bet where the optimal pace is, sometimes you know where the front runners are but then they go too hard and there’s nothing to carry the rest of the field behind them for the final couple of furlongs and the other side gets it.
Well done VTC. To be honest I don’t think its Champions Day, the races on the round track made sense, the group 1’s on the straight track are at the whim of the draw/pace when its a big field and you get loads of these random results on the Ascot straight, Royal Ascot is even worse because they try and cancel out the biases with random watering and then the favoured side changes from day to day. I don’t think the straight track at Ascot is actually a very fair course but no less than most I suppose, we’ve seen plenty of races at Newmarket with the same problem.
The weight change is just standard weight for age at the different points in the season. Delacroix in theory should be a more mature horse now than he was in the Eclipse so he gets less weight now. I wouldnt be seeing this as a two horse race to be honest Economics and Calandagan are no mugs. Always get some funny results on Champions Day in part because of the ground which should be fine this year but even then some with the form are over the top.
I didn’t back the winner but Hoiles made a good point in commentary, he beat Distant Storm in the Acomb, went off favourite for the Champagne and ran a bit below form but still wasn’t beaten that far by the subsequent Lagardere winner. What price would he have been today coming in unbeaten? Certainly wouldn’t have been 25/1 anyway
Some ride that from Dettori to be fair wasn’t it, he knew his draw was a big problem. Probably didn’t make any odds today to be fair best two came well clear. The German massive outsider Torquator Tasso? something like that won in the swamp that year from double digits too I think. Its not as bad as the Abbaye which really is like running a Group 1 sprint at Chester.
