Cheltenham Festival - Wetherby put Cue Card on course for Gold Cup and £1m bonus

It was just before 3.15pm on October 31 last year on a bracing afternoon at Wetherby as Cue Card, ridden confidently and positively by Paddy Brennan, strode clear on the run to the final fence of the Charlie Hall Chase, the feature race of the year at the West Yorkshire track.

Tizzard held his breath. He could barely watch. His great champion had not won in nearly a year, not least because of well-documented breathing difficulties, and the next few moments would determine whether the standard-bearer for the Dorset farmer’s racing operation was back to his best.

“When he pricked his ears going to the last, Paddy gave him a reminder,” said Tizzard whose rising star Thistlecrack, ridden by Tom Scudamore, won yesterday’s Ryanair World Hurdle.

“He put his head down and galloped straight to the line. He hadn’t been doing it for a long, long time. It was brilliant. When he came in this year after a break, I was pretty confident. He looked better. He looks fantastic now, mind. But it’s all very well doing it at home, you have to do it on the racecourse.”

Tizzard, speaking with that West Country burr that has endeared him to so many in racing, kept his own counsel – he was aware that the David Pipe pair of Dynaste and Ballynagour, second and third, respectively, in the Charlie Hall, had not produced their best form.

Yet any doubts were removed three weeks later when Cue Card galloped to a remorseless win in Haydock’s Grade One Betfair Chase.

Tizzard was so confident, after his horse had cleared to the last, that he turned to well-wishers watching the race with him adjacent to the running rail and acknowledged their delirious joy. His smile said it all.

At this moment, he also knew that the Wetherby result was not a fluke – the vanquished at the Merseyside track included two-time King George hero Silviniaco Conti.

“He finished his race and did it easy. He just ran away from them,” Tizzard told The Yorkshire Post.

Then to Kempton’s King George and a chance to end the heartache of 2013 when Cue Card appeared the certain winner in the home straight before being overhauled by Silviniaco Conti.

Two years later the reverse happened – it was Cue Card who ran on strongest of all in the closing stages to steal the race on the line from Ruby Walsh’s Vautour, who won the Ryanair Chase yesterday.

Scoring at the Festival for the third time in a row, the even-money favourite was giving trainer Willie Mullins and Walsh their sixth winner of the 2016 meeting.

While the King George race prompted Vautour’s connections to go for the shorter Ryanair Chase, it prompted Tizzard to go for steeplechasing’s ultimate prize and hope Cue Card has sufficient stamina for the Gold Cup’s three-and-a-quarter-mile test.

Yet, while there is a £1m bonus on the line if Cue Card becomes the first horse since the legendary Kauto Star to win the Betfair Chase, King George and Gold Cup, in the same season, it was the last thing on Tizzard’s mind.

Post-race celebrations were overshadowed by the sudden death, days later, of retired businessman Bob Bishop, who owned Cue Card with his wife Jean, but Tizzard concluded that connections have nothing to lose against a formidably strong Irish challenge in the Gold Cup in which Don Cossack, Don Poli and Djakadam, last year’s third, are among several to have solid claims.

He said that Cue Card’s form has always been far superior at Cheltenham where the horse won the Champion Bumper as a 40-1 outsider in 2010 before adding the Ryanair Chase in 2013.

However, the trainer believes the horse’s best performance was, in fact, in 2012 when Cue Card was beaten seven lengths by an “unbeatable” Sprinter Sacre in the Racing Post Arkle Trophy over two miles.

“Not many got that close to Sprinter Sacre. Cue Card has gone from being a good horse into a staying chaser,” said Tizzard, whose handling of the horse, while running his family farm, has endeared him to so many.

“Last year, he could not get up the gallop. One day he was fine, the next day he wasn’t. He had a trapped epiglottis – it was like having a golf ball trapped in his throat.

“He could only just breathe – he couldn’t even trot up the gallop. Whether it was affecting him to a lesser degree two or three years beforehand, we don’t know. He never made a noise.

“He has been good all season and he is still brilliant now – he looks like a staying chaser. It took all of Kempton’s three miles for him to get there – that is what Paddy Brennan said.

“People ask if he will he stay at Cheltenham but it took three miles to get past Vautour and if it had been another half-mile that day, I think we would have won it by two or three lengths, if not more.

“Cue Card used to be very flamboyant – he would tear off and not quite get home around Sprinter Sacre. But he is a different horse now – completely relaxed and he gets the trip.

“If I could win the Gold Cup, it would be the pinnacle of training.”