The opening fixture of the jumps
season for the past eleven seasons (COVID year excepted), and since 2017
programmed six days after Sandown’s curtain-closer in order to hammer home that
point, Cheltenham's hunter chase evening - which rolled around again last Friday - presents jumps racing’s HQ the way I
like it most. Usually pleasant spring weather, a tolerable crowd size,
and (for the last ten runnings, and counting) the peerless Martin Harris
commentating.
Only the addition of a hunter
chase over the cross-country fences to the evening could improve the format of
the fixture for me, it bearing at least some comparison with the mixture of
obstacles these competitors are assumed to be encountering on a day’s
hunting. The course husbandry and additional cost implications of
sloshing however many thousands of litres of water over it in the event of as
dry a spring as this year’s are, of course, well understood.
Being the season opener does mean
that the winning connections of the first race, the two-miler, have that
fleeting honour of heading the national jockey and trainer titles.
And I quite like that; building as
it does at once, however gently, the narrative of a title race which ultimately
culminates in a Nicholls, Henderson or (latterly) Willie Mullins emerging on
top, well over three million quid to the good, but which starts off with a much
smaller-time operator collecting a prize less than a millionth of that size.
Not that any of those three
trainers named is generally given to providing such characterful or colourful
copy as Joseph O’Shea, live contender already for the post-race interview of
the year (c.f. Aintree) and flying out of the traps for the 2025-26 campaign
here with the James King-partnered Barton Snow.
Mark this proving of the Snow Sky
gelding’s effectiveness around a big course as a very welcome bonus,
considering his actual longstanding target of the Restricted Final at
Stratford, as already mentioned on this blog following his Askham Bryan success
in February. He's going to line up in that contest horribly overqualified
for the job at hand, a fact hopefully not reflected in too disagreeable an
imposte of win penalties.
If Barton Snow entered Friday
evening’s fixture needing to prove his aptitude over a galloping Rules chase
track, Crawter lined up for the erstwhile Intermediate Final thirty-five
minutes later untried over any sort of Rules chase course whatsoever – and with
an offputting propensity to jump right even in victory between the flags to
factor in as well.
Those not dissuaded from backing
Harriet Waight’s six-year-old on either or both counts found themselves
generously rewarded to the tune of at least 11-1, with many of “those” likely
comprising pointing regulars more than familiar with Waight’s 27 pointing and
hunter chase wins at a near 28% strike-rate, all gained from just eight horses
– with never more than two campaigned at the same time - over fifteen
years. The acme of making a little go a long way.
The Enford handler had first
entered my consciousness when, as Harriet Besent, saddling the then still
unregistered Impact Area to win the Royal Artillery Members’ race at
neighbouring Larkhill under Louis Muspratt ten years ago, dispatching the very
much registered stablemate Deimne by 30l.
Quickly recognised as something
better than a “(U)” horse (as pointing form guides suffix them), the grey would
collect another five points – including the Coronation Cup - and a pair of
hunter chases inside the following fifteen months and take in Cheltenham
twice. His status as his handler’s best and most prolific horse ever
appears less secure now than it did following Crawter's highly productive
2024-25, however.
If few begrudged Waight those
initial successes with her own family’s horses back then, fewer still ought to
mind her more recent wins – of which Crawter’s at Cheltenham was merely the
latest - with animals trained for Stan Rawlins, course and estate manager of
the Larkhill point-to-point track for getting on for four decades now.
There’s a case to say Stan has one
of the hardest tasks of any course manager in racing, professional or amateur,
considering the sheer size of the twelve-fence Wiltshire circuit and a
chalk-based composition and exposed location that conspires utterly against
providing ground with any cut in anything other than a Biblically wet
season.
No rain? No problem.
Only the frosted-off Racing Club fixture has prevented Larkhill from once again
honouring its full complement of fixtures this term on ground often unarguably
fast, but equally unarguably perfectly safe, expertly rolled and topped – no
mean feat when officials at four other generally more favourably situated
meetings elsewhere were forced to admit defeat against the enduring dry spell,
and at least one other should have.
For that alone, pointing owes Stan
a sizeable thank you, and his racehorses a few more days and evenings in the
sun.
*****************
From those very much still with
us, to one who sadly is no more.
The most emotional part of hunter
chase evening for many, whether pointing diehards or part of the Racing TV
family, or both, would have been the dedicating of the fourth race (over the
full Cheltenham Festival Challenge Cup C&D) to the late Jonathan
Neesom.
Accepting, of course, that this
gesture, along with the touching tribute in the racecard and all of those
offered at the time of his passing last June, might have elicited a snort of “a
load of old bollocks” from the man himself.
Obituaries were already plentiful
enough at the time not to require reprising at this juncture, and I
additionally make no pretence or assumption of having meant the first thing to
Jonathan personally. Nevertheless, Friday evening’s race evoked some
memories of him, both direct and indirect.
Along with the aforementioned
Martin’s and Iain Mackenzie’s, some of Jonathan’s brutally honest and waspish
analyses, be they with a microphone in hand or committed to print, were the
ones that others of us would have sold our grandmothers to be able to pull off
so confidently.
What wouldn’t we have given to
come up with the notion of a race so slow that it could have been timed with a
calendar, or else of a hapless chasing debutant taking to fences like a duck to
treacle.
A high watermark in his writing of
close-ups for the Racing Post was surely reached in the 2008
running of Sandown’s Grand Military Gold Cup, when the performance of the
Reverend Simon Beveridge’s mount yielded a comment to the effect of, "Took
demonic hold, devilishly interfered with and cannoned into".
The first bit of that comment sadly appears to have disappeared in the
interim.
I suspect it was a brave
sub-editor who considered shortening or sanitising Jonathan’s work without
knowing exactly what they were doing. My mind immediately goes back to
the summer of my tenure at the Sportsman newspaper in 2006,
and to a rank bad, big-field Worcester staying handicap chase of the sort that
gives fuel to the fire of summer jumping’s detractors on quality
grounds.
Doing the Sportsman’s
equivalent of the Spotlighting verdict for the race, I’d had my damning of the
line-up as “superannuated” scratched out by a nervous locum editor. Over
at the Post, they’d let Jonathan keep the no less complimentary
“antediluvian” in his.
My recollections of Jonathan are
not solely of the withering or sarcastic nature, however. Far from it;
what he liked, he very much liked.
A crossing of paths in March 2010
took us both to Kingston Blount point-to-point (he racereading for the Loose-Leaf and
me just crossing off another new course), and his regard for the outstanding
winning ride that the then still amateur Adam Wedge gave a most ungenerous
partner in The Camerengo came through as much in our brief exchange after as in
print the following Friday.
That relatively early championing
of the future multiple Grade 1-winning rider endured into his professional
career. Check out the Racing Post archive replay of the
Wedge-partnered Oursininlaw’s Cartmel novice hurdle success of just a few
months later, the recording left running long enough after the race to include
genuine praise of a young rider going places.
In truth, I saw Jonathan around
less over the last ten to twelve years, as I gradually retreated from all
on-course Rules work and concentrated more on pointing in the northern half of
the country. But one of my very final in-person encounters with him came in the
parade ring at Market Rasen in November 2013, with he presumably between races
for Racing UK and me doing spotting for Timeform Radio, and it neatly
encapsulated so many sides of him.
“Hello, Jonathan, haven’t spoken
for ages”, I gormlessly offered.
“Yes”, he offered witheringly, and
looking slowly up from his notes, “and I think that was rather for the best,
don't you?"
Highly pleased that I'd
unwittingly set him up a half volley he could smash out of the park (or
perhaps, considering his beloved Plymouth Argyle, bury in the top corner) for
his own amusement , he then mellowed somewhat and we had a bit of a chat
about what we'd liked about the day's action - principally something called
Tiger Roll winning the juvenile hurdle - and what we hadn't.
Never one to pull his punches
regardless of the prevailing scenario, he was especially critical of the
unkempt appearance of a runner from Market Rasen's own Michael Chapman,
determinedly making the point that something trained in almost literally the field
adjoining the racecourse probably ought not be brought to the track looking
like it had just come out of that field.
Not wishing to push my luck overly
with superfluous dips into nostalgia, I nevertheless briefly recalled the
Pytchley point-to-point at Guilsborough that spring which I’d seen Jonathan
enjoying, and in particular how the favourites had gone through the card,
including typically strongly supported Don Cantillon newcomers in the final two
races (both partnered by Nico de Boinville two months away from the end of his
amateur career).
“That was a bloodbath”, Jonathan
remembered fondly, to which I suggested we ought to have built the bookies a
roof that day, so they could all have thrown themselves off it.
I’m glad we left it there,
Jonathan laughing heartily at the suggestion and me for once knowing when not
to try to top it.
I hope he borrowed that line on
air in another scenario one day.
And I hope that wherever he was
watching it from, he enjoyed his memorial race on Friday evening more than he’d
have let on.
*****************
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