The Sunday papers landed on Paul Nicholls’ doormat with the same dull thud that Tony McCoy had hit the turf at Newbury the previous afternoon. Then what had been Denman’s trial race for the totesport Cheltenham Gold Cup had concluded with an open verdict.
Denman had clouted the fourth-last in the Aon Chase and then finished the job emphatically with another blunder at the next fence. His sheer brute strength kept him going but the sudden departure of McCoy meant that the most high-profile new partnership of Valentine’s weekend had not been successfully consummated.
Suddenly those paid-up members of the grandstand jockeys’ association decided that McCoy, the 14-times champion jockey please remember, was not the right man for the job. Nicholls, as the man who trains horses like Denman and Kauto Star, has grown accustomed to people bestowing upon him the benefit of their ignorance. “I’ve read so much this morning it just makes me smile,” he said.
As a former jockey himself, Nicholls is acutely aware of just how easily a horse like Denman can shatter carefully-laid plans or four-foot-six of birch and was not blaming McCoy. “He did absolutely nothing wrong. I spoke to him this morning and said don’t even think you [did]. I wouldn’t let him sit on the horse at home because, just the nature of the beast, he wouldn’t be impressed. He’s that sort of horse.
“The mistake four out could have happened to anybody. He’ll ride him at Cheltenham and you’ll see a different horse at Cheltenham."
A different horse and, more pointedly, a different race in the Gold Cup which is far more likely to play to Denman’s prodigious strengths. This stage of the season is always something of a balancing for trainers attempting to use a race like the Aon as one step on a journey that leads to the starting tape at Cheltenham in five weeks’ time and it should be remembered that Kauto Star only scrambled home by a neck in the same race three years ago before winning the Gold Cup. “I was dead happy until he made the mistake four out,” Nicholls said. “The race went exactly how we thought it would – the mistake at the fourth-last cost him the chance. It’s as simple as that. He landed awkwardly, went out to the left, and the race was over then. Until that everything was A1.
“You’ve got to remember a couple of things. One, he’s nearly a month off being anywhere near as good as he was in the Hennessy, mentally and physically. And it’s a trial for Cheltenham – not the real thing. You look back at the Hennessy, and he was almost in the same place turning in, with Niche Market behind him, as he was yesterday.
“The trouble is what he does is idle. The great thing in the Hennessy was What A Friend took him on all up the straight and he battled. And I think you’d have found yesterday if he’d jumped the fourth-last and, if Niche Market had got anywhere near him, he’d have picked up and gone and won the race.
“Racing’s all about jumping – you make mistakes and you don’t win. He made a mistake that cost him yesterday - but don’t write him off.”
The work to fine-hone the edge that Denman will need if he is to have a chance of edging Kauto Star out of the winner’s enclosure at Cheltenham next month will be done behind closed doors on the gallops but Nicholls knows there will be days when it would seem that it is all going wrong. “He’s the sort of horse who, if people saw him work at home, one day he would work absolutely brilliantly and the next day he’s canter along in front of the string, pull up and cause havoc with the gallop because they’re all queuing up behind him.
“He’s such an old character, and only just does what he wants to do. He’s the sort, the better the race, the faster they go, the better he runs. And all his best performances have been in those championship races. Sometimes in those trial races it’s hard to get it right. I don’t think now he wants to be blitzing off flat out in front – he needs a good, fast-run race with it all happening around him.”
At this time of year everything appears to be happening around Nicholls and the totepool Game Spirit Chase at least reassured him that Master Minded has recovered from the cracked rib that had threatened to blunt his talents and a third victory in the Queen Mother Champion Chase now looks close to hand. “It was a pleasing effort because he jumped straight, he didn’t hang and, as I said before, a lot to work on because we only started riding him again on January 6th after he’d had that setback,” Nicholls said. “He’d done three half-speed bits of work, lots of steady work so he’s bound to improve on that and sharpen him up.”
A sharper Denman may allow McCoy to deliver a blunt riposte to his detractors.
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