the downside of 'super-fresh'.

​In so many aspects of the horse racing world Dan Skelton is a breath of fresh air. I like him, respect him as a trainer and am pleased when the Skelton brothers and wife/sister-in-law achieve important successes. I do not want this piece to sound ante-Skelton but from going from a stance of hoping they land one of the Blue Riband races at the Cheltenham Festival, I now hold the opposite view.
In today’s Racing Post, Dan is quite strident in his view that to win at the Festival horses need to be ‘super-fresh’. And he has nailed his colours to the mast as his three main contenders for Cheltenham, Shan Blue, Nuba Negra and Protektorat are unraced in 2022. Shan Blue maybe by necessity as he suffered an injury when falling in the Charlie Hall at Wetherby at the start of the season, though from what Dan said it is pretty certain he would have run only once between then and Cheltenham anyway.
You can legitimately say that he knows his horses better than anyone, especially me, and that he has the facilities to get a horse fit to win first-time out, which is more or less what he is attempting to do come the Festival. But what if two out of his top three win, proving the ‘super-fresh’ theory correct, at least on this occasion? It will become stable policy; each year his top horses will run once, perhaps twice, before Boxing Day and then not appear in public until the Cheltenham Festival.
What he is in effect saying is that all the top-grade races after Boxing Day until the Cheltenham Festival might as well be excised from the racing calendar as they serve no purpose. The Relkeel, Clarence House, Cotswold Chase, Cleeve Hurdle, Denman and Game Spirit Chases, the Ascot Chase, Kingwell, Reynoldstown, all a waste of time and money.
And as for staging a British version of the Dublin Racing Festival, well delete the debate as it would serve no purpose. And, of course, Willie Mullins, Gordon Elliott, Henry de Bromhead and others might as well keep at home all those horses they ran at Leopardstown whether they won or lost, because, if Dan is correct, horses need to be ‘super-fresh’ to stand a hope of winning at the super-competitive National Hunt Festival.
Of course, if it goes tits-up for Skelton come March, his trio of ‘super-fresh’ horses will seek compensation at Aintree, Sandown or Punchestown before the season draws to a close, with all talk of ‘super-fresh’ confined to the trash-can or Google search engine.
This sport, especially in Great Britain, is in need of all the help it can get to thrive and survive and the ‘fad’ – a fad that threatens to become mainstream – is the exact opposite of what is required. Blankly ignoring the big condition races between Boxing Day and the Festival is super non-competitive and smacks of a desperate attempt to keep horses sound and on track to keep owners on-side. The sport needs the top horses to run in the major races in January and February to keep the narrative boiling, to super-charge, if you like, the anticipation of the glories to come in March.
The example – to prove my point, if that is possible – I like to give is Clan Des Obeaux. Paul Nicholls, as he said of Frodon without any evidence to back-up the claim, is that Clan likes to be fresh. Yet he doesn’t win first time out. Come April onwards, or even in March given the horse ran in the Denman this season, can anyone see Tornado Flyer beating him over 3-miles? Yet in the King George, when the race fell apart, Clan des Obeaux was firmly put in his place by Danny Mullins and a horse that on ratings had climbed a mountain to win.
If Appreciate It wins the Champion Hurdle after a 12-month absence from the track it will be honoured as one of the great training performance of all-time. And quite rightly so. But it would be comparing oranges with limes if used to down my point on this matter. Not running for 12-months was not a deliberate choice by Willie Mullins; it is a strategy forced upon him. It would be celebrated as a great training achievement because of its rarity, not as proof of ‘super-fresh’ being the latest training method of choice.
‘Super-fresh’ can only do harm to the sport and it should be discouraged, if not actually out-lawed. The sport must come first; the sport must be protected from insiders whose goal is to display to onlookers how damn clever they are.