Let’s be clear, if the King George VI Chase and the Christmas Hurdle need a new home in, as is being suggested, the not too distant future because the Jockey Club sells Kempton, the JC shouldn’t have the automatic right to determine their future.
The iconic races are not ‘owned’ by the Jockey Club, whose option-to-purchase arrangement with developers Redrow could be triggered any time between now and the end of the decade, thus forcing the course’s closure. They belong to jump racing, and it should be the sport that decides.
JC managers might well favour moving the Boxing Day features to its track at Sandown – where the King George has taken place twice in recent years, once because of bad weather and the other when Kempton was being redeveloped – though another in its portfolio, Aintree, has also been mooted.
At least, being right-handed, Sandown meets some of the criteria provided by Kempton for the mid-season, middle-distance steeplechasing championship, ie that it’s a completely different challenge to the Cheltenham Gold Cup. However, as fine a racecourse as Sandown is, King George day is hardly going to get bigger and better there.
No, if the worst happens (and I hope it doesn’t), racing should go for right-handed Ascot as the place that offers most opportunities – British jumping could do with a Christmas jamboree at a venue that could host a large crowd, and even if the ground is bound to be softer than Kempton’s traditional conditions, the King George programme would, along with the goodies that Ascot already stages this coming Saturday, form the basis of a real Yuletide festival.
Carroll’s singing
Willie Mullins was voted Trainer of the Year, for the second time on the trot, by the Horserace Writers and Photographers’ Association earlier in the month, with Andrew Balding, Karl Burke and Francis-Henri Graffard the other nominations. All four have done terrific jobs…as has, albeit on a rather different scale, Tony Carroll. The one-time jockey’s Worcestershire-based operation has once again soared beyond a century of flat winners and (for the first time, and by a considerable margin) has surpassed the £1m prizemoney mark, figures achieved with horses bought for modest prices and racing mainly at locations like Wolverhampton, Brighton and Bath. A magnificent feat, and due every accolade in the book. For me, however, it was the trainer’s successes at Windsor in late June that stand out: in barely a week, his likeable eight-year-old Lequinto provided apprentice Matthew Lloyd Slater with the first, second and third successes of his fledgling career, and the rapturous reception from regulars when the hatrick was completed as dusk was beginning to descend at 8-45 on a Monday night (of course), was a reminder that it’s not just about the best known days and highest profile horses and people. Wonderful.
Something for the weekend…
An intriguing rematch between some of the principals from Cheltenham’s Greatwood Hurdle is on the cards for the Ascot Rotary Club Festive Handicap Hurdle – the old Ladbroke – at Ascot’s pre-Christmas meeting, and, at the prices on offer, the veteran Faivoir is perhaps the most fascinating as he seeks to extend Dan Skelton’s consistent run of Saturday success that stretches back to the start of the ‘core’ NH season at Chepstow on October 11. Faivoir, absent for nineteen months until early November, demonstrated that he retains his old zest when third in the Greatwood, and races off the same weight level as when successful in the 2023 County Hurdle – plus he has Heidi Palin’s useful seven-pound claim, making him, as they say, dangerously well handicapped. At the time of writing, there’s plenty of 16/1 about.
