I'LL BE SURPRISED AND DISAPPOINTED ...

​I have Peter Scudamore’s autobiography winging its way to me and I’ll be surprised and disappointed if he does not declare Carvill’s Hill the best he ever rode.
Those of you who remember Carvill’s Hill will doubtless have catalogued him in either the ‘what-he-might-have-been’ or ‘ultimately disappointing’ list. He was certainly a conundrum, a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ as Winston Churchill once said of Russia. Yet his performance in winning the 1991 Welsh Grand National must rank as one the best weight-carrying triumphs since the days of Arkle. Indeed, I believe it ranks up there with anything Arkle achieved, or at least almost.
The Welsh National of 1991 – it seems so long ago, doesn’t it – was run on rain-softened ground and comprised the likes of Twin Oaks, Esha Ness, Aquilifer, Cool Ground, Party Politics, Zeta’s Lad, The West Awake, Kildimo and Bonanza Boy. Horses that won the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the Grand National, the Hennessey, a horse who ‘won’ the National that never was, a twice winner of the Welsh National and a horse who regularly served it up to the great Desert Orchid. It was a cracking renewal of the race. A far classier race than in present times.
Yet Carvill’s Hill, whether by design or simply because he was a horse who determined his own tactics, annihilated, as in destruction of soul and body, the opposition, under top-weight jumping and galloping to a long-measured victory that has to be seen to be believed. Look it up on YouTube; I defy anyone not to be awe of the horse. And yes, he did jump, nearly every fence taken in Frodon and Bryony Frost style, with only the odd bunny-hop as reference to how bad a jumper we seem to remember him being.
Controversy courted Carvill’s Hill all his life. Any son of a famous father, a father who had trained the best steeplechaser ever to grace the planet, and, at the time, the second-best steeplechaser, must dream of one day emulating the success of the father. Jim Dreaper found the horse to transport him to those realms when Carvill’s Lad came into his life. In Jim Dreaper’s care he was either spectacular or a blundering ox of a horse and his subsequent transfer to Martin Pipe was seen as both an insult to Dreaper and to the whole of Irish racing.
He is undoubtedly the classiest steeplechaser to come out of Ireland since Arkle. As a novice he soon had the burden heaped upon him as ‘the second coming’, the horse to return the Gold Cup to Ireland for years to come. Experts either eulogised over him or condemned him as racehorse easily beaten, an opinion that Jenny Pitman was to prove all too correct in the 1992 Gold Cup.
Until the Welsh Grand National, if I remember rightly, there was little love for the horse, his despatch from Jim Dreaper leaving a bad taste in the mouths of enthusiasts’ both sides of the Irish Sea. After the Welsh National all that negativity went out of the window and there was a wave of hope that he would silence the doubters and assume the mantle left vacant since Arkle retired.
Jenny Pitman took a lot of flack for the tactics she insisted Martin Bowlby employ on outsider Golden Freize, reining back so that Carvill’s Hill could be hassled at his fences, not allowing Scudamore to dictate, trying to get Carvill’s Hill ‘at it’, to put him on the floor, as many thought post-race, to make the job of winning the race easier for her main horse Toby Tobias. I very much doubt if a horse lover like Jenny Pitman would ever seek to harm a horse. The tactic was undoubtedly to prevent Carvill’s Hill from dictating as he had done at Chepstow, and there was no love lost when it came to her professional relationship with Martin Pipe, with envy preventing her from accepting that her greatest adversary was a bit of a genius and not the cheat she suspected him to be.
Carvill’s Hill made a mess of the first fence and a few after that and his failure was attributed to the first blunder. He finished lame, his injuries preventing him ever running again. In my memory Carvill’s Hill pulled up at Cheltenham, which he did, but not out in the country as I thought before re-watching the race on YouTube. He pulled after the last fence, Scudamore walking him past the winning post.
Cool Ground won the 1992 Gold Cup, beating The Fellow and the admirable Dockland’s Express in a pulsating finish – a very poor commentary by Peter O’Sullivan, by the way. Cool Ground had pulled up in the Welsh National, unable to get within a furlong of Carvill’s Hill at any stage of the race. The turnaround in form barely credible.
I suspect Carvill’s Hill was fragile. He was either right at a fence or he wasn’t, with the jockey unable to do much about it. He was bold and brilliant but he couldn’t dance, change his stride inside the wings. He was big, beautiful and clumsy. Perhaps it was a combination of the Welsh National sapping his strength and the tactics employed against him that exposed his weakness in the Gold Cup.
I started by saying that I’ll be surprised and disappointed if Peter Scudamore does not rate Carvill’s Hill the best he ever rode. I doubt, though, if he was ever a favourite of his. One swallow does not make a summer, of course but he was, though, even if only on this one day, a great steeplechaser. Watch the Welsh National of 1991 and dare to tell me I’m wrong.