Cheltenham Festival 2016: Cue Card can reward followers in landing £1m Gold Cup bonus
Colin Tizzard-trained 10-year-old in line for jump racing’s most prestigious pot and the massive cheque that goes with final part of Grade One treble
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Your support makes all the difference.Vautour’s late defection has taken lustre away from the Gold Cup, but it still leaves a thoroughly intriguing, not to say high-class, renewal of Cheltenham’s traditional highlight.
Just five runners can now be seriously considered – Djakadam, Don Poli and Don Cossack for Ireland, Cue Card and Smad Place for England – and almost equal cases can be made for and against all of them.
The Gold Cup is the one glaring omission from trainer Willie Mullins’ astonishing CV and in Djakadam and Don Poli he must fancy his chances of at last setting the record straight.
Djakadam chased home Coneygree last year and, with that winner forced to miss the contest this time through injury, he would appear to be in pole position. But that previous experience of the race, once thought so important, might count against rather than for him; modern-day Gold Cup winners tend to be first-time runners. The ground might now be faster than ideal, too.
The almost white Smad Place has Gold Cup baggage as well, having finished eighth 12 months ago, although he is now a different proposition reinvented as a Desert-Orchid-like trailblazer, so impressive when blitzing everything in the Hennessy Gold Cup, then when beating Many Clouds in a Cheltenham trial in January. He should ensure the proper strong pace this race deserves.
Don Poli had future Gold Cup winner written all over him when bounding up the hill in last year’s RSA Chase and, though he has hardly set the pulses racing with two subsequent victories, he is not the sort who will ever do much more than enough.
No one , therefore, should be put off that the owner’s first jockey, Bryan Cooper, has chosen instead to ride Don Cossack. Rated the best staying chaser in England and Ireland last season, Don Cossack was challenging Cue Card and Vautour when falling at the second-last fence in the King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day and might well have beaten them.
And so to Cue Card (3.30). Back in November this winner of the Champion Bumper in 2010 and Ryanair Chase in 2013, put himself in line for a million-pound bonus after winning Haydock’s Lancashire Chase, but few took him seriously, believing rather that it was the last hurrah of an old boy past his prime.
His trainer, Colin Tizzard, who had identified and had treated a trapped epiglottis as the cause of Cue Card’s temporary demise, knew otherwise, and a gutsy triumph in the King George – the middle leg of the challenge – under an inspired Paddy Brennan suddenly puts the 10-year-old in line for jump racing’s most prestigious pot and the massive cheque that goes with this final part of the Grade One treble.
He still has stamina to prove and Cheltenham’s extra two and a half furlongs might prove just beyond him but, in a week when Annie Power and Sprinter Sacre have rewarded the romantics, it might be worth following the heart again and staying loyal to the much-loved Cue Card.
Ivanovich Gorbatov (1.30), supervised by Aidan O’Brien’s son, Joseph, as he begins his career as a trainer, is not a great price for the Triumph Hurdle, considering he flopped so dismally at Leopardstown last month, but the ground was hock deep and the four-year-old will be much more at home on this quicker surface.
Mullins has a surprisingly abysmal record in jumps handicaps in England, but an exception is the County Hurdle, which he has won three times in the past six runnings, and he looks to have another likely sort in Great Field (2.10), impressive on his recent first Irish start.
Both Ivanovich Gorbatov and Great Field are owned by JP McManus, whose familiar green-and-gold colours are also quite likely to be carried to victory in the Foxhunter Chase by On The Fringe (4.10), a ridiculously easy winner of the race 12 months ago before completing the discipline’s big double at Aintree the following month.
Selections
Jon Freeman
1.30 Ivanovich Gorbatov
2.10 Great Field
2.50 Shantou Village
3.30 Cheltenham Gold Cup (1. Cue Card; 2. Don Poli; 3. Don Cossack)
Chris McGrath
4.10 On The Fringe
4.50 Qualando
5.30 Sizing Codelco
3.30 Cheltenham Gold Cup (1. Don Poli; 2. Smad Place; 3. Don Cossack)
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