Royal Encore will miss Festival in 
bid for Cup success

Last season’s Cheltenham champion bumper runner-up, owned by JP McManus, has resumed work after having had a break following his surprise defeat at Hexham in December.

Though the six-year-old holds entries at this year’s Festival, Honeyball revealed Regal Encore’s main target was Sandown’s feature, in which he would be making his handicap hurdle debut, the weekend before Cheltenham.

“He’s fine and ticking over. He’ll have an entry in the Imperial Cup. I don’t think he’ll get in any of the handicaps at Cheltenham off his mark of 130, but we’ll enter him in them and see,” said the Dorset trainer.

“He’s in the Supreme and the Neptune but he won’t run in either of those, I’d have thought.

“The Imperial Cup is where we are aiming him for and, hopefully, he’ll have a good preparation for it. It would be nice to go for that and see where we are.”

Switching codes onto the Flat, leading American colt Verrazano will next season be trained in Ireland by Aidan O’Brien, Coolmore have confirmed.

The former Todd Pletcher-trained four-year-old is a two-times Grade One winner and is due to remain in competitive action, rather than be retired to stud at Ashford Stud in Kentucky.

Ashford manager Dermot Ryan said: “Being the best son of More Than Ready who is doing so well as a sire in Australia, we feel that a European campaign would raise his profile when the time comes for him to shuttle there.”

Verrazano was one of the best American three-year-olds in training and was last seen finishing third in the Cigar Mile at Aqueduct in November.

Tomorrow’s jumps meeting at Ludlow is subject to an 8am inspection this morning.

Although the course was found to have been fit for racing on Monday morning, further rain has been forecast.

The going is currently heavy.

Clerk of the course Bob Davies said: “Things are looking a bit better than they have been and we could have raced today.

“We had a dry day yesterday and it was dry overnight. The forecast for the next couple of days is looking better than it was yesterday.

“It’s cloudy and overcast at the moment.

“They are talking about us getting four millimetres of rain tonight and another four millimetres tomorrow night.

“If we don’t get any more than that, I think we’ll be okay.”