WATERFORD EXHIBITOR Rosemary Connors backed up last year’s victory in the supreme hunter championship on Saturday with Woodfield Valier, her RDS young stock title winner of 2006.
Bred by Ms Connors’s late father Nicholas Connors, the seven-year-old bay first won the mares championship in the main arena and then she won the lightweight crown ahead of the 2004 supreme champion, Mike Lewis’s Ricardo Z gelding Lorenzo, which was making his final appearance at Dublin.
The four-year-olds dominated in the heavyweight championship where Frances Cash, back from retirement, took the title on the Limerick gelding Downtown which she owns in partnership with top flat jockey Kevin Manning. The reserve heavyweight champion was Cheerio, a chestnut gelding by Amiro M ridden for owner Lyndsey Wallace by Comber producer Richard Iggulden, who hopes to be back in Dublin with the horse next year.
Iggulden won the middleweight championship where he partnered Gillian Smith’s gelding Millbank Classic to stand head of James Lynch’s seven-year-old gelding, The Mighty Celt. Bred in Co Carlow by Patrick Byrne, the bay is also produced by Iggulden and was ridden by Co Tyrone’s Nicky Corr.
In the battle for the title of champion four-year-old, the Mabel Morrow-bred Downtown, which was produced for the show by north Co Dublin-based Kieran Ryan, triumphed over the middleweight gelding Bloomfield Ackzo, ridden by Jane Bradbury for owner Daphne Tierney.
While all three weight champions had their supporters, there was huge approval of the judges’ decision to award the supreme championship to Woodfield Valier. The reserve Dublin title went to Millbank Classic which also won here back in 2007.
By Lucky Valier out of a non-registered thoroughbred mare by Pierre, Woodfield Valier’s next assignment is the international horse trials at Camphire at the end of the month.
The 2006 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner War Of Attrition was the popular winner of the racehorse to riding horse class. Last year’s winner Brave Inca could not defend his title as he was lame but there was still an excellent turnout of high-class horses and some others who never made it on the track.