The turf
Loyalty counts
Robin Oakley
Wc will, I hope, never have another National Hunt season like the one which ended last Saturday at Sandown. The hail which beat down on our heads as the Whitbread Gold Cup winner Ad Hoc was unsaddled seemed highly symbolic after a winter of saturated courses, cancelled meetings and the scourge of foot-andmouth. And yet it ended on a glorious note. The epic duel between Edredon Bleu and Fadalko for the ladbrokescasino.com Championship Steeple Chase had the most hardbitten racing hacks reaching for the superlatives spray-can. As Edredon Bleu's owner Jim Lewis declared: 'I'll play that video a million times. It was sheer guts-guts and Tony McCoy.' And so it was. You simply could not hope to see a better two-mile chase than this perfect substitute for Cheltenham's lost Queen Mother Champion Chase.
McCoy, as he said, had held a gun to Edredon Bleu's head from the very first fence. With the horse answering every call, they'd jumped clear of the field down the back, only for Ruby Murray and Fadalko to close up coming to the Pond Fence. Over the last two and up that sapping Sandown run-in the two horses and their jockeys duelled with no quarter given while Edredon Bleu's trainer Henrietta Knight as usual hid in the laurel bushes. She got her head up in time to conclude that her star two-miler had been touched off on the line. Tony McCoy thought so too and was furious. Given his distaste for defeat, you would not have wanted to be a wall within banging distance of the McCoy bonce come Saturday night if he had. But once again, as at Cheltenham with Direct Route the year before, Edredon Bleu had held on in the tightest of tight finishes in one of those races where you hate there to be a loser.
The joy in the unsaddling enclosure would have warmed the heart of a Siberian gaoler. 'He's just such a brave horse,' said Henrietta Knight. 'He hates to be headed.' She had worried if her pride and joy, always so bouncy at home, where he loves to work on his own, might be over the top after she had readied him first for the cancelled Cheltenham and then for Aintree. where the ground turned against him. 'He puts everything into his races. It's unfair to go to the well too often.' McCoy could not have been more effusive in his praise for the heart and spirit of the horse who had
now truly proved himself to be Britain's champion two-miler. But there were other smiling faces too. One I discovered, was that of Jackie Jenner, who looks after Edredon Bleu in his Wantage yard. What is the champion like at home? 'He's hardworking. A nice ride. A gentleman.' Interestingly, Jackie adds, 'He's getting stronger.'
Smiling too were the losing jockey Ruby Walsh — 'That was some race, wasn't it?' — and the sporting Robert Ogden, owner of Fadalko, who was sympathising with the sadly deceased Frenchman responsible for both the first two coming to Britain. He'll be taking on Edredon Bleu again. 'We've got to, haven't we?' he smiled. Buy your tickets early for the re-match.
I'd had no bet in Edredon Bleu's race, partly because I could not make my mind up and partly because over lunch with the amiable Ladbroke's team one of their executives reminded me that all the form experts he knew drove second-hand cars and holidayed in Morecambe.
For the big race, the Whitbread Gold Cup, I divided my stake between Heidi and What's Up Boys. I discarded Ad Hoc after a former champion jockey, who shall be nameless but who lives in Lambourn, can never find his hairbrush and is irresistible to women, informed us that nothing which had run the four miles of the Scottish National the weekend before could possibly have a chance.
I'm glad it happens to him too. Ad Hoc cruised up to What's Up Boys on the bridle two out and went away to win by 19 lengths, bringing well-deserved compensation to Ruby Walsh and Robert Ogden and in the process making Mr Ogden the season's winning owner. It was a neat end to a season which had begun with Ad Hoc the hot property on most people's Ten to Follow, only for the horse to earn an entry of FFP for his first three runs. Delighted trainer Paul Nicholls, on a hot streak with 11 winners in three days, insisted that the horse had been unlucky and paid tribute to Mick Fitzgerald for his efforts in rebuilding the horse's confidence. Ironically Mick, who had chosen to ride Geos for his retaining stable of Nicky Henderson in the first, only to see him beaten by stable companion Landing Light, was this time riding the other Ogden horse Kingsmark. Ruefully I
heard him reminding Nicholls of Ad Hoc 'I always told you he was your best horse.'
But there is Somebody Up There. After what proved to be the last as the weather closed things down, the mud-spattered Fitzgerald did ride into the winner's enclosure on Henderson's Goguenard. 'A little justice at last,' said Nicky with real feeling. 'He's had such a brute of a day and there's no need to tell you what my jockey means to me.' Even in such a season the Seven Barrows yard has notched up a record number of winners, more than 80. Just watch them go now in a full year. And it's not just the quality of the team which does it. The deeply embedded mutual loyalty of trainer and jockey counts for a lot.
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