Road to Cheltenham: Gino what I'm now wondering?

Welcome back to the second week on the Road after an eventful long weekend spilled over into Monday across two countries, like all the worst weddings these days. In this case, however, we weren’t all secretly hoping we could slink out after the first dance. Even the speeches were worth hearing, albeit there was still the odd embarrassing encounter caught on camera.

There will be no Willie Mullins Bingo in the novice-chasing division. Whether this was in response to concerns about the prevalence of problem gambling in this grandmother of once-innocent pursuits, the Closutton Order obviously did not say.

But Kopek Des Bordes is Arkle-bound and Final Demand heads for the Brown Advisory. Everything else trained by Willie Mullins can and will fit in around them.

Furthermore, we also know these horses’ next steps because Horse Racing Ireland has elected to grant a reprieve to Leopardstown’s 2m1f Grade One novice chase at its Christmas Festival and kick out the three-miler in its stead. You may recall Ruby Walsh’s oft-stated disdain for HRI’s first-draft revision of this programme last year, which saw just four horses pitch up for the Racing Post Novices’ Chase won by Croke Park.

Anyone would think Mullins running Ballyburn against Sir Gino in Kempton’s Wayward Lad Novices’ Chase instead of anywhere in Ireland over Christmas – a decision he also didn’t highlight, much – had an impact more wide-ranging than potentially holing that horse’s confidence below the waterline.

To accommodate the nascent staying chaser this Christmas, Limerick’s Grade One Faugheen has had its distance extended by a furlong and a half to 2m5f. This creates a knock-on complication for those not ultimately considered good enough for the Brown Advisory because qualification for the Festival’s NH Chase requires its participants to have started in a minimum of three chases and finished in the first four over 2m7.5f or further in at least one of them.

Clearly, Ireland’s programme alteration could still benefit Kempton but just in a different way. If a young Irish stayer wants a soundish surface and would be run off their feet over 2m1f to their developmental detriment at Leopardstown, the Kauto Star is your best bet.

Whilst welcoming the reinstatement of the shorter Grade One, the Irish Racehorse Trainers’ Association has registered its disquiet with HRI’s Jump Pattern Committee’s deletion. “Removing it leaves us with just one three-mile Grade One novice chase, which falls at Punchestown at the very end of the season,” chief executive Feidhelm Cunningham told Mark Boylan in the Irish Field - click here to read more.

“Of the last five winners, three went on to win at the Cheltenham Festival and the ratings they’ve achieved stack up strongly… We feel the change to the distance at Limerick is unnecessary, too. That race has been performing well year on year and extending the trip isn’t needed when you take into account there are no additional fences to be jumped.”

For what it’s worth, I think this revision is a both a sensible move and a better fit for a contracting horse population. And perhaps this latter, more fundamental problem is worth greater attention rather than bemoaning the sticking plasters forcibly being administered to the quality race programme on both sides of the Irish Sea? However, Cunningham’s point about Limerick’s fences will be worth exploring with Ruby in Thursday night’s show.

I suspect Paul Townend won’t be a fan of how the revised programme is being enacted, this year at least, at Leopardstown because – if all goes to plan between now and Boxing Day – he will be required to choose between riding Gaelic Warrior in the King George and Kopek Des Bordes at Leopardstown. Neither is a straightforward ride, but the novice needed interventions from his rider – as well as impressing with his raw ability – at Navan on Monday.

Patrick Mullins has ridden both horses in the past and partnered the elder horse to his most famous success to date in the Aintree Bowl, yet we saw last season through the prism of the Irish Champion Hurdle what Rich Ricci thinks if the stable jockey isn’t on his chief contender…

Briefly, I was also interested in HRI’s decision to exclude seven-year-olds from all graded and Listed bumpers as well as any horse who won a graded bumper in the previous season. Runners in such bumpers also can no longer run more than six times – still too many, as is Britain’s five – nor reverse into them from hurdling (excluding Academy Hurdles) to align with over here. Anyone would think we’re trying to develop jumpers! Nice one.

Post-State Man permutations have narrowed, at least for now, after last week’s sad news that Joe and Marie Donnelly’s part-of-the-furniture multiple Grade One-winning hurdler had suffered a serious tendon injury at home. Speculation immediately flared that reinforcements could be called up from their high-quality yellow-and-black-chequered army, billeted either side of the Irish Sea.

Yet – as Nicky Henderson swiftly confirmed he would – their Punchestown Grade One winner Lulamba went on to make a relatively straightforward winning chase debut at Exeter the following Monday over a shortened course of just eight fences (reduced to clear by a third due to the low sun). This was no slam-dunk decision, though, as his trainer made plain post-race. Lulamba had also been entered in France’s Prix Renaud Du Vivier, a Grade One Hurdle at Auteuil for four-year-olds and ultimately fought out by talented pair It’s Win O’Clock and Sain D’Esprit.

“We put him in there,” Henderson acknowledged, when questioned on the subject by Nick Luck on Racing TV. “I think it was to wait and see how the schooling had gone. But from day one really, it was obvious that [Lulamba] was good. He can do it. He can stand off from here to the moon, but he can fiddle his way [as well] – he’s very clever on his feet.

“He’s had three or four good schools, and he’s just been so clever every time – you can let him loose or you can fiddle around. He’s got all you want. And when you’re that good at it, it seems a pity to mess about over hurdles.”

What the trainer said next, in passing whilst primarily talking about Lulamba, might have been missed by some, however. “We did it [going chasing with a four-year-old] for Joe and Marie with Sir Gino last year and unfortunately that campaign got cut off before we really found out. He just won the one at Kempton,” Henderson continued. “I mean he could still go either way, to be honest with you.

“But we’re not going to go back now [with Lulamba]. We didn’t go to France; we said we’d come here and let’s hope all’s good and we can march on to Sandown [for the Grade One Henry VIII Novices’ Chase] and on from there.”

So, the notion – as discussed in last week’s opening show in the new Road To Cheltenham series – that events might conspire to make Sir Gino the Donnellys’ chosen deputy for State Man come next March is not fanciful. His trainer has stated: “He could still go either way.” That is, we must infer, hurdling or chasing this season. The question is whether those conspiring events, dear boy, add up to a 16/1 shot on ante-post terms?

Regarding the horse himself: does he retain all his pre-infection ability? That’s hard to judge until we see him on a racecourse. Henderson has reported some discernible change to Sir Gino’s hind-leg suspensory ligament, the site of that virulent infection, but his expert veterinary advice – supplied alongside a regime of monthly scans – is that all is well and to push on.

Christmas is the earliest we can expect to see him, albeit Henderson has also said “we don’t have to push to get anywhere” – meaning his targets will manifest according to his pace of training and not the other way around. The Desert Orchid Chase has been mentioned as a best-case scenario, which would raise the notion of Sir Gino facing the Champion Chase on a maximum of three prior starts over fences, provided he also takes in the Game Spirit in February. Realistically, that could mean merely two preps – quite the ask. When it comes down to it, would Henderson fancy that?

There are several interlocking elements here, including Mullins' choice, first of entries and then of his declared runners for this weekend's Morgiana, but the most notable related contingency for Sir Gino’s season is the inevitable Constitution Hill. 

He was fully discussed in last week’s Road column but since then has pitched up amid the heady excitement of Tuesday’s gallops morning at Newbury. For once of late, Henderson emerged from one of these shebangs with his star’s dignity intact.

Admittedly, the 2023 Champion Hurdler wasn’t facing friendly fire of the calibre of Sir Gino as he did this time last year at Newbury – albeit both Act Of Innocence’s current and former trainers, Henderson and Paul Nicholls, each stated their regard for the Taunton bumper winner, who joined 119-rated Therapist in setting up the gallop for their illustrious stable companion.

“This will have brought him on, he’s got to have a school, and he probably will do another bit on Sunday or Monday,” Henderson reported of Constitution Hill afterwards, noting that Kempton’s Head of Racing and clerk of the course Barney Clifford has loaned him a set of the new padded hurdles that arguably flummoxed Constitution Hill at Cheltenham and Aintree last term.

“This fellow’s jumping has got to be polished in the next week or two. I’ve got some hurdles now, we’ll let him have a pop over those,” the trainer added. “The remodelling of the whole thing [the horse’s hurdling] started after Punchestown. We realised we had to do something, and we’ve done a lot of things. We’ve taken him down to every nut and every bolt and put the whole thing back together with a lot of advice and then a bit more.”

Henderson was also widely asked to expand on his comments in the Racing Post on Sunday that Constitution Hill has “suddenly developed quality”.

“I think he’s lengthened a bit; he’s got slinkier, if you like,” he said on Tuesday. “I always thought he was a bit of a block of a horse; he was very square, very solid. He looks like he’s stretched out a bit, and I don’t know why, it just occurred to me a few months back. I was putting him in his box, and I thought ‘you’re a good-looking boy’, I’d never looked at him that way. He was always a nice horse, but not a particularly pretty one.”

I guess it’s possible that if the Seven Barrows team has rebuilt this horse from scratch over the summer, the result might be a differently shaped athlete. Equally, as Henderson himself cheerily acknowledged, maybe that’s just in the trainer’s head.

Whatever, the talking will cease when the rising-nine Constitution Hill faces Turners Novices’ Hurdle winner and Champion Hurdle ante-post favourite The New Lion at Newcastle on Saturday week.

If that proves the once-untouchable hurdler has still left an important part of his brain somewhere in a field on Merseyside, then you would imagine retirement would immediately beckon. I should stress that Henderson has given no indication this is the case, but neither was he expecting what happened at Punchestown.

Last week Ruby Walsh agreed that, even if Christmas meant the Desert Orchid for Sir Gino, he would still surely get a safety entry in the Unibet Champion Hurdle – for which entries close in mid-January. Entries for Kempton’s Christmas Hurdle close on December 20. If he’s ready in time for that fixture, his Festival target might already have been decided three weeks earlier.

Theories abound for the latest contribution to Jonbon’s growing body of work to suggest he’s not at his best at Cheltenham. One of his jockeys has known this for a fact all along:

Matt Tombs, the expert trends analyst who joins us on the Road each year in February, has suggested on this site that perhaps the horse “struggles to get into a rhythm” due to there being much more jumping early on at Cheltenham than at the other four courses in Britain and Ireland to host Open Grade One chases at around the minimum trip.

“Typically, the fourth fence on either course at Cheltenham is jumped after just over 20% of the time taken for the entire race.  At those other four courses it’s typically between 35%-42%,” he wrote in a pre-Shloer column for racingtv.com

“In the build-up to last season’s Champion Chase, lots of punters were dismissive of the concern that Jonbon had consistently run to a few pounds lower a rating at Cheltenham than elsewhere,” he added. “It was a classic case of each individual excuse sounding reasonable but less plausible when looking at his runs at Prestbury Park as a whole.”

I remember Matt making this argument at the London Racing Club’s Cheltenham Festival preview night – join us in 2026! – shortly after I’d crafted a long list of individual excuses for his Cheltenham record. Fair point, I ruefully thought.

You can still make those excuses – not primed for his seasonal debuts in the Shloer with the Tingle Creek just three weeks away, nor for the Clarence House when rescheduled a week closer to his Festival target, forgiven defeat by peerless Constitution Hill in the Supreme and even against an on-blob El Fabiolo in the Arkle, playing catch-up after missing the break in the Champion Chase in March. Perhaps there were some split-second riding errors thrown in along the way, too, whilst on the back foot.

However, for a horse who’s still never finished outside of the first two in his 23-race career – last Friday, thanks only to Matata’s cataclysmic final-fence error – there haven’t half been a lot of times and places when and where he has been deemed below his best. As a novice hurdler, his Rossington Main success was deemed unimpressive; as a novice chaser, a workmanlike win in the Kingmaker was received as a dent to his Arkle prospects.

For Henderson’s part, he was startlingly unfazed by events of last Friday. “I think if you go back to his last two performances in the Shloer, it’s never been his most impressive day out but we’re [always] conscious it’s three weeks before the Tingle Creek,” he said.

“In that ground and [with] a much more competitive field than he’s met the last two years… and in that ground, which isn’t his, he doesn’t jump so well out of it… I’d take it that with the normal improvement that he does find from the Shloer to the Tingle Creek that we wouldn’t be far away from where we’ve been the last two years.”

To my eyes, Jonbon jumped the first well but was never happy thereafter on ground that Timeform classified as heavy. It was also a good gallop, pressed and extended by a race-ready rival in the winner L’Eau Du Sud – whose dominance, in a race that imploded, is hard to judge. Is he a more complete package, finishing off his races better? I haven’t got a Scooby.

Perhaps Jonbon lost his rhythm from the second fence onwards, as per Matt’s theory. He’d also undergone summer surgery to improve his breathing – albeit, as Jane Mangan noted on Racing TV pre-race, Henderson’s choice of bridle and Jonbon’s lack of tongue-tie suggested this intervention can be classed as minor. Perhaps he’d be more comfortable over further these days, or perhaps he’s on the downward slopes at the age of rising ten – two ideas that amount to the same thing.

However, if you listen to the collective thoughts of Henderson – and perhaps even Coleman and Tombs, if their analysis chimes with you – then 7/2 and drifting about Jonbon for the Tingle Creek starts to look attractive. And after watching him run the worst race of his entire life, I can’t believe I’m starting to think this way.