Paul Nicholls has best Cheltenham Festival team since Kauto Star days
|
Version 0 of 1. Paul Nicholls, Britain’s champion trainer over jumps, said on Tuesday he feels his team for this year’s Cheltenham Festival are the strongest he has sent to the meeting since the days when his outstanding champions Kauto Star, Denman and Master Minded dominated their opponents. Nicholls is second only to Nicky Henderson among current trainers in terms of the number of winners he has sent out at the Festival but he has not won a steeplechase at the meeting since Kauto Star took the Gold Cup in 2009. Nicholls has also drawn a blank in the Grade One events at the last two Festivals, returning to his Ditcheat base with only a single success in a handicap hurdle each time. This year’s squad will be down on numbers from last season, with about 25 horses likely to represent Nicholls rather than the 36 who went to post in 2014. In terms of quality, however, Nicholls has leading chances throughout the meeting, and he will be double-handed in the feature event on the last three days. Dodging Bullets and Mr Mole will represent Nicholls in the Queen Mother Champion Chase on Wednesday, while Silviniaco Conti, the favourite, and Sam Winner will line up for the Gold Cup two days later. With Zarkandar and Saphir Du Rheu vying for favouritism for the previous day’s World Hurdle following the news that More Of That, last year’s winner, will be unable to defend his title, Nicholls has high hopes of a first Grade One winner at Cheltenham in March since Big Buck’s took his fourth World Hurdle in 2012. “This is probably as good a squad as we’ve had for a while, since we had all those good horses,” Nicholls said. “We’ve got nice chances in a lot of the good chases and the World Hurdle, it’s great to have those sort of horses again. “With the success we’d had with all those other horses [like Kauto Star and Denman], it was incredible, and you just miss that a little. But if you haven’t got those horses for Grade One races, it doesn’t matter how much you imagine, it’s not going to happen. We’ve managed a winner in each of the last two years and I always think that anything more than that is a bonus. It’s getting harder and harder to win there now.” Willie Mullins, Ireland’s champion trainer, is preparing to send a team to next month’s with a quality in depth to match any in Festival history. Nicholls, though, is undaunted. “I’m just going to concentrate on mine,” Nicholls said. “The depth of the novice hurdlers [in the Mullins stable] is very strong, that’s why you’ll probably see that I’m dodging a lot of them to mind mine for the future. I’m a bit light on novice hurdlers this year, and at the end of the day, Aintree [in April] is also a massive meeting now with great prize money and we like aiming at that as well. I don’t want to run horses [at Cheltenham] just for a day out, we learned that the last couple of years by running too many that didn’t have chances. “Willie has got a fantastic squad of horses and has done very well to get them. I think we’ve got a great team [too] but as always it’s extremely competitive, you just look at the betting for all the races, it’s going to be very tough You can run really well in all the races and get placed and not have a winner, but we’re very happy with where they are and the way they’ve been performing.” This year’s Festival will be the first for Sam Twiston-Davies in his new role as Nicholls’s stable jockey. The partnership recorded its first significant victory at Cheltenham in November when Caid Du Berlais took the Paddy Power Gold Cup and trainer and jockey have recorded a series of big-race wins since to send Nicholls into a dominant position in the race for the trainers’ title. “He’s done amazingly well,” Nicholls said. “He’s won more prize money than any other jockey this season. A lot of people thought it might not last and it was the wrong decision, but I’ve never even once thought that. “He’s going to make mistakes and he’s made a couple which we’ve talked about [but] I think the ride on Rocky Creek [in the BetBright Chase at Kempton] on Saturday was one of the best he’s given. He’s improving all the time and he’s a nice lad, everybody likes him. I said when I started that it was an investment for the future, if I hadn’t got on with it then he would have gone somewhere else. It’s turned out to be a very good move.” With four previous winners in the Gold Cup – See More Business, Denman and Kauto Star twice – Nicholls is one short of the record of five victories set by Tom Dreaper in 1968. In addition to Sam Winner – described as a “live outsider” for the race by his trainer – Nicholls will saddle Silviniaco Conti, the winner of the King George VI Chase at Kempton in 2013 and 2014 but without a win in his three previous starts at Cheltenham, including the last two Gold Cups. The ante-post market seems to share the doubt of some punters about Silviniaco Conti’s ability to produce his best form around Cheltenham, as the nine-year-old is a 3-1 chance when his record and rating suggest he should be closer to 6-4. Nicholls, though, is confident that his runner is a better horse this season. “When Master Minded won the Champion Chase as a five-year-old, people said he couldn’t win because a five-year-old had never won it,” Nicholls said. “Statistics are always there for the breaking. He’s run well at Cheltenham [over hurdles], he ran very well when he fell [three out in 2013] and you can forgive any horse that, and last year he jumped the last in front so he hardly didn’t act on the course. I think we can ride him a little bit differently this year and what he’s doing this year is finishing his races better than he did last year. Even at Aintree [last April] when he won, he didn’t finish his race how I’d like him to. “I think he idled in front and that’s why we put the cheek pieces on which stopped him idling.” “We also found that he was suffering from gastric ulcers, which we are on top of now. A lot of horses in training suffer from those, not just him. It’s something you learn about horses when you’re training them, it can take two or three years to get the best out of them, you just never stop learning about them.” |