Friday, February 02, 2007

GEOS - VERY SAD, BUT NOT A STICK TO BEAT POINTING WITH

Despite its uncommonly early start in the UK this time around, with a handful of fixtures in December, the point-to-point season is still very much in its early throes with the thick end of 175 meetings still to go at the time of writing. In what racing there has been so far, however, we have already lost a few faithful servants to the racing game; and none more high profile or keenly felt as GEOS, one of the smartest horses to mix hurdling and chasing in the last quarter century (highest rating over each of 165 and 153 respectively) and the winner of two Tote Gold Trophies, a Christmas Hurdle, a Bula Hurdle and a Castleford Chase.

A million miles away from the Grade 1 tracks and big purses, Geos was taking part in a novices' riders' point-to-point at Tweseldown in Hampshire on January 7th under Nicky Henderson's daughter Camilla and was, as you might expect, marching all over the opposition when falling at the water jump - an obstacle rarely seen between the flags nowadays - with fatal consequences for himself and a fall resulting in a broken collarbone for Miss Henderson.

Whether they express it openly or not, doubtless there'll be a few in racing who will be wondering what the hell the Hendersons were doing persisting with Geos at this level, when he had surely little else to prove after a glittering career (see also Door Latch, Vodkatini and Djeddah among other high-profile fatalities in point-to-points, the first two at the same fence in the same race). As far as I know, however, the fact is that Geos was a horse who didn't want to retire.

It was never the intention for him to go pointing when he was officially retired by Team Henderson in August 2005, but rather that he'd just enjoy himself at Seven Barrows for the rest of his days. In the end, though, he was clearly giving so many signs that he was still up for competing that they got him qualified with the Old Berkshire a few months later and opted to let him take his chances between the flags.

He ran three times in 2006, winning the last of these, a Confined Novices' Riders' event at Lockinge on April 17th (good). Although primarily associated with exploits over far shorter, he saw out the 3m trip pretty well in the end, emerging victorious after a being held up early on to score in the second fastest time of the day. This was Camilla Henderson's first ever winning ride, and the gelding had proven a tolerant and giving schoolmaster in the face of her fairly nervous first forays into race-riding in public.

Without necessarily pulling up many trees outside of Confined or Novice Riders' class, I would still have expected horse and rider to have developed an increasing understanding over the course of this year, but sadly we will never know now. That it ended this way doesn't make the returning of Geos to competitive action any more ill-advised or cruel, just very, very unfortunate, and God knows there's animals in the pointing field half his age who continue to present a greater danger to themselves and others than he would have done if he'd continued to run many more years into his dotage.

To that end I am hopeful that another top-class hurdler COPELAND, who has recently returned from nearly two years out of action, will defy the advancing years and make an impression in the point-to-point arena this winter. He is certainly in good hands to do so: trainer Emma Leppard and rider Cynthia Haydon managed to coax five wins out of five in the amateur sphere (including the big ladies' hunters' chase at Stratford) from CARRYONHARRY, the former Martin Pipe inmate and one of the laziest animals ever to walk the earth, and picked up where they left off with him by asking him nicely to win a ladies' open at High Easter last weekend by a very comfortable 3/4l.

Copeland turned out in the same company at Cottenham the following day in his pointing debut, and still held a slender lead at the last before the lack of race-fitness told. He had no discernible form beyond 2m5f under Rules previously, but then Geos didn't really either, and for the time being at least the view is taken that he can improve on this first effort and develop into a major player between the flags before too long... and it takes a very hard heart, or some of the less palatable myopia that a small number of pointing fans insist on exhibiting, not to wish that for him.

ALL THAT'S MISSING IS STUART MACONIE

If it's the start of the year it must be time for the Racing Post to run another "100 Greatest..." poll, and this time around it is greatest rides the paper has been asking its readership to nominate.

These polls are never entirely satisfactory, with the races most recent in the memory or most frequently repeated on the specialist TV channels always likely to enjoy more elevated positions in the final countdown than some of them might ordinarily (however much assurances to the contrary may be made). To that end, then, it's heartening to see that Fred Winter's scarcely credible feat of not only staying, but winning on board Mandarin in the 1962 Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris having jumping the last 21 of the 25 fences with his bridle in bits, has made the final shortlist of 1o. And this despite - unless anyone knows different - the race not having been shown on UK terrestrial or digital for decades, if ever, and only (admittedly a big "only") Lord John Oaksey's evocative report of the achievement to go on in print.

Everybody will have their favourites among the 100 races to have made the cut and I have mine, too, including the race that just made the cut in position number 100, John Goulding's pillar-to-post victory aboard humble novices' hunters' chase winner Astral Charmer in the 1981 Scottish Grand National. I would have been about six and a half years old at the time and it was certainly the first horse race I ever saw that left an indelible mark in the memory. Big-priced horses don't go running off like that in front and stay there, I thought, especially when they really want to go back in their boxes instead (Astral Charmer tried to run out with a circuit ago but Goulding gathered him in most adeptly). Well, young Master Grayson, one of them did that day.

I'm not sure Astral Charmer is solely responsible for my enduring love of the marathon chase, the marathon chaser, the "little guy" winning, or some, all, or none of the above. Even now, though, I can still picture this unprepossessing animal popping Ayr's big, wide fences in splendid isolation whilst a big field lumbered and ultimately floundered behind him.

Another marathon chase performance I am pleased to see in the list is at number 61, and if Astral Charmer could be regarded as a little bit of a thinker judged on that mid-race antic at Ayr, then Rith Dubh has to go down as Albert Einstein. One of the most intelligent, and consequently least generous animals ever to grace a racecourse, he nevertheless found himself in the winner's circle at the 2002 Cheltenham Festival; almost certainly not by his design, though.

A gelding who routinely stopped as soon as struck with the whip, he was given the last word in quiet rides in that year's National Hunt Chase by the tremendous amateur John Thomas McNamara, dropped right out the back for the greater part of the race before being asked nicely, over and over again, to put his best foot forward until produced on the line in to win by a head.

To complete the marathon triumvirate, I am delighted to see that the assorted tribulations, travails and controversies surrounding Richard Guest in recent months have not entirely served to dissuade people from remembering just what an immaculate piece of horsemanship his getting Red Marauder home to win the 2001 Grand National in borderline unraceable conditions actually was. This, lest we not forget, was a horse far better at 2m4f than beyond it, who had bags of ability but at the same time the robustness of a piece of China, an oxygen deficiency and - most insurmountably of all, one would have thought - all the jumping prowess of a fridge freezer.

No horse will ever take so many of the big green fences at Aintree so awkwardly and win a major prize there, let alone do so leaping out of such desperate going; and the fact that Red Marauder did owed so very much to the degree to which Guest knew the gelding's every foible in his then role as trainer-in-all-but-name at Norman Mason's Brancepeth base. The What's A Filly incident will have hit Guest far harder than any of the withdrawals of owners' strings or sponsors from his yard in the last 15 months or so, as it has inevitably called into question the treatment of troubled animals in his care - arguably the thing which he has always held the most sacrosanct and never more in evidence than during Red Marauder's finest hour.