RACING NEWS:THERE ARE fears an extensive rejigging of this month's racing calendar to facilitate the rescheduling of Leopardstown's Hennessy meeting to this Saturday will result in some of Ireland's principal Cheltenham hopes having to run closer to the festival than connections would prefer.
The prestigious Hennessy card will now be run next weekend after heavy rain over 48 hours forced the cancellation of the fixture yesterday morning. An inspection found the Co Dublin course to be waterlogged.
It was another blow to Horse Racing Ireland’s planners who had already lost Saturday’s Naas fixture when it too was caught out by the heavy rainfall.
The result is a reshuffled fixture list which sees Gowran Park’s valuable trials day moved a week from this Saturday to the following Saturday (February 19th) in order to facilitate the rescheduled Hennessy card.
As a result, the original February 19th card at Fairyhouse has been moved to the following Wednesday (23rd), with Navan moving their original fixture 48 hours to Friday the 25th.
Initial indications are that the six-day delay to the Hennessy programme won’t affect many of the appearances by some of Irish racing’s star names. But Pride Of Dulcote, ante-post favourite for the €180,000 Hennessy itself, is likely to miss out.
“He is likely to go for the Grade One Betfair Chase at Ascot,” trainer Paul Nicholls said.
Ireland’s champion trainer Willie Mullins said yesterday that he still intends to run Cooldine and Kempes in the Hennessy, as well as the exciting novices Zaidpour (Deloitte Novice Hurdle) and Mikael D’Haguenet (Dr PJ Moriarty Novice Chase).
However, he also admitted a 31-day gap from this Saturday to the start of Cheltenham is not perfect in terms of festival preparation.
“You would have to worry about it and it’s not ideal,” Mullins said. “However, my view is the races at Leopardstown stand up in their own right and are well worth winning. So we will run in them on their own merits.”
The defending Hennessy champion Joncol will also wait for this weekend, according to his trainer Paul Nolan. “We would have preferred if it had gone ahead today and probably everybody is in the same boat. Hopefully they will be able to race next week, because after that it will probably be too close to Cheltenham for some of the horses,” he said.
“It’s not ideal. Real Gold Cup contenders would not want a real slog over three miles before the Festival. I suppose most of them in the race were Gold Cup outsiders, but Saturday is tight enough for Cheltenham.
“As far as we are concerned the Hennessy is our Cheltenham for Joncol. That’s our aim for the season with him. Hopefully we can keep him in one piece until Saturday and we’ll get him there as healthy as he was today.”
The fixtures reshuffle means Philip Fenton, trainer of the Champion Hurdle contender Dunguib, also has more time to play with in order to give his stable star a belated first start of the campaign.
Dunguib is being targeted at Gowran’s Red Mills Trial Hurdle, a race won by Hardy Eustace in 2004 ahead of his Champion Hurdle triumph, and although an extra week could help the former bumper champion, who met with a recent infection setback, the new proximity of the Trial to Cheltenham is worrying his trainer.
“It is getting a little close to Cheltenham. If there’s a hiccup of any sort there isn’t much time to recover,” Fenton said. “But this also gives us an extra week for Gowran, so hopefully he will be ready in time.”
Leopardstown’s manager Tom Burke reported that another British challenger for the Hennessy, the 2008 winner The Listener, could still take his place on Saturday. “We were expecting a drop of rain over the weekend but nothing to the degree we got. We were taken completely by surprise, as were Naas. We got up to 40mm and there is more heavy stuff forecast for later in the day,” Burke said.
The Naas fixture lost on Saturday has not be rescheduled as the track got over 50mm of rain and the authorities want to focus on fixtures in two weeks and on March 6th.
Edward O’Grady could still have a pair of Grade One hopes in action at Leopardstown on Saturday with Shot From The Hip (Deloitte) and Sailor’s Warn (Spring Juvenile Hurdle) still in contention to take in their Cheltenham trials.
However, the unbeaten The Real Article could bypass the Festival and wait instead for the Aintree Festival in April.
“His entry in the Supreme is more of a ‘just in case’ entry than anything else and the chances are that he might be more likely to go to Aintree. That was my original plan, but trainers can change their minds,” O’Grady said yesterday.
“He’ll work fairly soon and then we’ll decide where we run him. If he ran at the end of February, then the possibility of running at Cheltenham would certainly be live.
“But if doesn’t run until the end of March, then Aintree would be the more obvious place to go.”
