Racing: Knight's Warrior gifted victory by Quasimodo's fall

Every race is a crossroads, and while there were only three realistic candidates for the novice chase here yesterday, their trainers were all made to stare hard at the compass afterwards.

Henrietta Knight and Terry Biddlecombe, conforming to cranky caricature, could not decide whether their winner, Aztec Warrior, was better racing right-handed, as here, or the other way round. Henry Daly was doubtless disappointed with the laboured runner-up, Opera De Coeur, but was entitled to point out that his best performance over fences remains his reappearance at Aintree, first time out - when he finished second and Mark Bradburne was suspended for making insufficient effort. Both men were affronted by that punishment, and by what they perceived as ignorant, sanctimonious criticism of sympathetic horsemanship. Certainly the horse has not jumped anything like so well in three starts since.

But what of the horse who should have beaten both? Colin Tizzard sent out three winners on New Year's Day, two at Exeter and one at Cheltenham, but has since begun to fear that in the process he exhausted his entire quota of fortune for 2007.

Tizzard has never had a better team of young jumpers in his Dorset yard, and has even given one of them, Bob Bob Bobbin, an entry in the Totesport Cheltenham Gold Cup itself. He has notably high hopes of the horse he brought here, Mister Quasimodo, and it was easy to see why as he jumped and galloped with such freedom round a track that demands alacrity. Unfortunately, with Aztec Warrior struggling to match strides, he hit the deck at the second last and fired Tizzard's son, Joe, into the ground.

"Joe said he would have won, but you never know," Tizzard said. "After all, the competition is to jump the fences. The main thing is that he got up and ran away. He's a bit battered, and he'll have three weeks off now, but he's fine."

With the winner not out of the equation for the Royal & SunAlliance Chase at Cheltenham, Tizzard will keep the faith - as he has throughout. "Nobody would touch him at the sales," he recalled. "Every single agent saw him, because he's out of that lovely mare, Dubacilla. She was second in the Gold Cup and fourth in the National. But they all came away and said he was deformed in his back. So we got him for 20,000 guineas, and that's how he got his name."

Matters did not improve for the Tizzards when yet another of their budding prospects, Nougat De L'Isle, emerged as the sole challenger to Portland Bill in the last. Unfortunately, he swerved violently left before a hedge on the running rail directed him in pursuit of the leader, who held on by a nostril at the line - in the process confirming Daryl Jacob the sort of reputation once prematurely granted young Tizzard.

Still, father and son would no doubt settle for a backlog of luck being reserved for Flight Leader, whose defeat of more experienced rivals at Cheltenham on New Year's Day - under a penalty for his impressive win there the previous month - confirmed him Britain's most accomplished staying novice over timber. He will now test his progress against no less a rival than the unbeaten Black Jack Ketchum, back at Cheltenham on 27 January.

"He's in at Warwick on Saturday, but I don't think he'll run even if the meeting is on," Tizzard said. "He has been put up to 160 by the handicapper and if he can run to that [rating] he shouldn't be an outsider for the Cleeve Hurdle, so it's not as if he would have to go to Warwick to justify doing that. He's an amazing horse, because he has never shown anything at home, he just looks after himself really."

As for Aztec Warrior, Biddlecombe felt he might have won anyway, even though Timmy Murphy had dropped his stick, and that he would be better going left-handed at Cheltenham. Knight, meanwhile, arrived to announce that she had not seen the race, but was adamant that the horse preferred a flat, right-handed track like this one. Nor could they agree whether Racing Demon, third in the King George VI Chase, would revert to hurdles in a handicap back at Kempton tomorrow. "I'd like to run him, because he lost too much time in the air over his fences in the King George," Knight said. "And he's very well. But it looks like he'll end up with top weight, so we may leave him for a chase at Ascot next month."

Chris McGrath

Nap: Bellaney Jewel

(Catterick 2.20)

NB: Falkenauge

(Hereford 3.30)