In a departure from the conventional Cheltenham build-up, Nicky Henderson spent last Wednesday with his staff at a tenpin bowling alley in Swindon celebrating the stable’s first coup of the spring – Simone Meloni winning employee of the year at the the Godolphin industry awards.
Henderson’s eyesight is, he readily admits, not the best. When Constitution Hill ploughed through the last in the Unibet Hurdle at Cheltenham on Trials Day, he joked that it was just as well he could not see it.
In Swindon he claimed two strikes (all 10 pins) despite not being able to see the end of the bowling lane. If that was beginner’s luck, there is nothing lucky about his training career.
It is 40 years since See You Then, a 16-1 shot, under a supremely cool ride from Steve Smith Eccles, displayed what would become a trademark burst of speed to power away from his rivals up the hill. It was the first of See You Then’s three Champion Hurdles, the first of Henderson’s nine winners of the race, and the first of his 73 Festival winners.
The usual trajectory for a trainer is; starts small, does well, hits the heights, stays at the top of the mountain for a decade or two before some sort of terminal decline as the zest of youth and ambition wanes, then younger owners seek someone from their own generation to train for them. Henderson’s four decades at the top are remarkable in any sport.
It is a job to know whether Henderson, 74, had the foresight back in 1985 to see that winning at the Festival would become so important or whether, by making it what was then his unique selling point, he set a trend which his colleagues would follow.
But though he would probably prefer not to be pigeon-holed as such – he argues that his two odds-on shots this week, Constitution Hill and Jonbon, have both won their Grade Ones along the way – he is the ultimate eggs-in-one-basket trainer; his stable’s year, the mornings in horizontal rain, essentially boils down to the next four days.
It was, therefore, like a dagger to his heart when a bug ripped through the yard 10 days before last year’s Festival, ruling all of the stable’s big shots – Constitution Hill, Jonbon and Sir Gino – out of the meeting in their first Cheltenham blank for 16 years.
This year he might consider himself a winner before the meeting even starts with a squad of 20, a strong chance of winning three of the big four races (Champion Hurdle with Constitution Hill, the Champion Chase with Jonbon and Stayers’ Hurdle with Lucky Place), the Triumph Hurdle with Lulamba and Arkle with Jango Baie. That’s before you take the handicaps into consideration.
“It’s nice to be in a position to get excited again,” he says. “We’re lucky to have a good bunch of horses, the best for some time. With that it brings the pressure back on a bit and it’s become very busy again. I’m quite happy for the hounds of Fleet Street to chase me day and night because the day they don’t, you don’t have any decent horses and it’s time to pack up. We’ve got four or five strong chances and lots of possibles but if you listen to these preview nights everyone’s got lots of fancies.”
A typical conversation between Henderson and the press begins with a flustered, even slightly annoyed, trainer saying he only has two minutes to talk. Invariably half an hour later the canary is still singing.
When he moved to Seven Barrows in 1992 it took him, he says, five years to work out how to use the gallops to their best effect and find a spot for an all-weather gallop for the day-to-day routine stuff.
“I looked everywhere and I was sitting in the kitchen one summer’s day and saw a combine on a field opposite carve the perfect strip up the bank to a beech wood on the hill,” he says of his eureka moment. “I rang the farmer and he said ‘I wondered when you’d finally work that out.’”
I always remember Mick Channon telling me that the best thing that can happen to a horse is to get beaten – an experience Constitution Hill, ready to regain his title, has yet to taste because of the pressure it builds. Ironically, the better the horse the harder the watch.
“In a little way, yes,” agrees Henderson. “We’re the ones responsible for him and making sure he shows up on the day or there’ll be a lot of people who will be disappointed and I don’t like disappointed people. He just travels, he frightens you a bit jumping-wise.
“We’ve been very lucky with these Champion Hurdlers over the years and they have one thing in common; their ability to cross a hurdle very quickly. The danger of them all is, and Buveur d’Air fell foul of it in his third year, is that the margin is very small when you’re timber-topping. Get it wrong by an inch and you’re in trouble.
“He’s only made two errors in his career, the last in his Champion two years ago when he was crazy long but got away with it because he was fresh, not tired, and very much again the other day in the Unibet.
“That was just being silly. There was a degree of self-preservation but I suspect a tired horse wouldn’t have found a leg. He’s mentally pretty agile too. He’s got that last hurdle wrong twice.”
It is not only the humans at Seven Barrows that know the Festival is here. “He [Constitution Hill] has had his last school now and, much the same as Jonbon, it’s flicked a switch. They know, the week before. There’s no point in schooling them because we can’t teach them anything but they’re very much on the button now. They seem to know, it lights the fuse which has to burn quietly for a week. They know it’s coming, they’re quite intelligent.
“I don’t think there’s a secret to it (his longevity at the top),” says the great adapter, well aware that training these days is about so much more than just getting a horse fit. “If there was, you’d know it because I’m not good at keeping secrets. I think we’ve been very lucky, the owners are the best, they’re all good friends and we enjoy it together. Some have gone but the faithfuls are very faithful and it’s got to be fun.
“There are two lots of important people, two main ingredients, in this game; one is the owners, two is the team behind us, that’s crucial, every single person is crucial. There are a lot of important two-legged people and a lot of four-legged ones. If both of those are top class then you’ve got a good chance. You couldn’t go anywhere without either.
“Why we all get so ridiculously wound up about this whole parade is that you know what can go wrong. Look at Sir Gino [still with the vet after picking up a “dreadful” infection]. He’d have been our poster boy and he’s not out of the woods yet. Anything can happen – it’s very squeaky bum going into the Festival. Poor owners, I don’t think they like getting a call from me this week whether they are JP [McManus] with lots of horses or Michael [Buckley] with one.
“Why does it last and how long will it last for? I don’t know but while I’ve got these sorts of horses I’m not going anywhere. I’m not letting anyone else have these, they’re all mine. The owners will tell me when to go.”
A good week, some of those eggs hatching into chickens, and you can rest assured Henderson is likely to be out celebrating with his ‘lads’ again on Saturday night, the drinks once again on Seven Barrows.
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