Charlie Hall may signal beginning of Long Run National tilt

The champion trainer’s logic is this: he wants to give Robert and Sam Waley-Cohen’s horse of a lifetime the best possible chance of competing for top honours this season, including a possible tilt at the Crabbies Grand National, and the reinvigorated West Yorkshire track’s most valuable race of the year is the obvious starting point.

“We are taking a slightly different view now,” Henderson told the Yorkshire Post in an exclusive interview. “Now he is eight, he’s won his Gold Cup and two King Georges, he’s got to go and do some racing. If he comes out of the Charlie Hall well, he’ll go for the Grade One Betfair Chase – that has always been the plan – but I just feel he needs a race before Haydock.

“He was beaten there two years ago by Kauto Star, that’s no disgrace because it was one of his best ever performances, but I perhaps feel that Long Run lost to Silviniaco Conti 12 months ago because the Paul Nicholls horse had won the Charlie Hall and was a bit sharper. The plan is to send Bobs Worth, the current Gold Cup winner, to Haydock and I’m doing what is right for Long Run – I want to give him every chance of beating the champion. There are no favourites.”

Even though the Group Two Charlie Hall, now worth £100,000, will be no walk-over against rising stars like the dashing grey Unioniste and Cheltenham Festival winner Benefficient –who will be ridden by 18-times champion AP McCoy today – Henderson’s mind is razor-sharp as he talks about Long Run’s options.

A return to Kempton on Boxing Day to defend his King George VI Chase crown is inevitable, where victory would see the French-bred chaser join a galaxy of greats in Kauto Star, Desert Orchid and Yorkshire’s Wayward Lad as the only champions to have won at least three renewals of steeplechasing’s mid-season championship.

And then it gets interesting. Has Long Run the speed, he asks, to become the second horse, after Kauto Star, to regain the Gold Cup, or will his relentless galloping be better suited to a crack at the National?

“He’ll have an entry in both,” says 62-year-old Henderson. “But would you race in both? Probably not. And then there’s Punchestown. It feels as if he has been around forever, but these are exciting times. You forget that he is still only eight.”

This is a horse who has never been out of the first three in his 26 races over hurdles and fences, first in France, and then with Henderson. Of these, the gelding has won 14 contests and caught the public’s imagination when beating Keith Reveley’s unfortunate Tazbar in the 2009 Grade One Feltham Novices Chase at Kempton.

Though not as flashy as his stablemates like Sprinter Sacre and the now injury-sidelined Simonsig, Long Run’s grinding style – often from the front – is emblematic of how Henderson was gradually able to erode the dominance of the Nicholls stable before he became champion trainer in 2012-13 for the first time since the mid-1980s.

This is also the horse that provided Henderson with a long-overdue first Gold Cup win in 2011 when Long Run’s galloping proved too sharp for those turf icons Denman and Kauto Star.

“He’s a gorgeous horse and it’s his toughness that stands him out,” said the trainer.

“Go back to the King George last year. He had the race won, then he looked beaten at the last, and then he battled back and nicked it on the line. I hope people appreciate just how good he has been.”

And could still be.

For, talking to the horse’s owner Robert Waley-Cohen who looked after Long Run this summer at his family’s farm in Oxfordshire, he believes Long Run is “coming into his own” as he prepares to become the first Gold Cup winner to race in Wetherby’s signature race since 1999 blue riband winner See More Business, another remorseless galloper and fluent jumper, won his second Charlie Hall in 2000.

That is why today’s race means so much to the Wetherby executive who are expecting a bumper crowd – and the ever enthusiastic Waley-Cohen whose son Sam, a successful businessman who rides in his spare time as a widely-respected amateur, will be in the saddle.

The well-spoken chairman of Cheltenham Racecourse, the owner oversaw the horse’s pre-training in the summer – walking and trotting – but quickly points out that he was not in the saddle.

“I left that to Sam. I’m too old and fat!” said Waley-Cohen senior. “The immediate target, should all go to plan, is the Betfair Chase and then the King George – very few horses have won three King Georges.

“I think it will be the Gold Cup or Grand National, but not both. Today will tell us more. He has never won brilliant firstly time out over the past three years – he has been beaten in the Paddy Power Gold Cup and then the two Betfair Chases.

“This is a Group Two race and he’s going to give weight to his main rivals who were some of last season’s top novices. If they have any likelihood of becoming superstars, this is the day to show it.

“The three-mile chase division is incredibly competitive – we were beaten in the Gold Cup by Bobs Worth who is the first horse since Tom Dreaper’s Flyingbolt (stablemate to Arkle) in the 1960s to win three different races at the Festival.

“But it is just possible that Long Run is maturing at the age of 18. Most 17-hand horses don’t mature at a young age, they don’t come into their own until they’re seven or eight.

“He may have won a Gold Cup at six, but we should be coming into our peak now. I hope so.”

Waley-Cohen’s son Sam certainly concurs. Though he has only had a handful of rides this season, he has a natural affinity with Long Run.

“It’s great to be starting off another season with him and it’s going to be really exciting to get back on him on the racecourse again,” he said. “Nicky thought he had summered really well this year and he is fit and well, so he might as well go to the races.

“I actually rode Long Run’s full-brother, Bica, to win a hunter chase there, but that was a few years ago in 2007. I think it should be a decent track for Long Run.

“It’s his first run of the season, so we want him to come out and show he is fit and well and that he retains all the ability he showed last season. That is the main focus. After that, it’s about building a good foundation for the rest of the season.”

tom.richmond@ypn.co.uk