Ante-Post Focus

There are question-marks over most of the main contenders for the Champion Hurdle, so it could pay to take a bit of value on Rock On Ruby.

The first thing that strikes you when you look down the field of candidates for the feature event on Day 1 of the Cheltenham Festival, the Champion Hurdle, is how many question marks there are over virtually every contender.

Hurricane Fly, the hot favourite and reigning champion, hasn’t run since April having missed his two anticipated comeback runs over the past month or so, at Punchestown and the Leopardstown Christmas Festival.

He’s said to have delighted trainer Willie Mullins in a work-out at Leopardstown last week and if he makes a winning return in the BHP Insurance Irish Champion Hurdle at the end of the month, he’ll probably be close to odds-on at Cheltenham on Tuesday 13 March.

However, there’s one too many ‘ifs’ there for my liking and I wouldn’t be wading in too deeply at the odds of 2/1 now generally available.

So if he is to be dethroned – and I’m not saying he will, I’m just saying the odds are not that attractive – who’s most likely to do it?

Next in the betting is Nicky Henderson’s Grandouet, who hasn’t done a whole lot wrong this season. But is a four lengths defeat of Overturn, who may well be a very good handicapper but is short of top class, a good enough trial? The favourite for that race, the StanJames.com International at Cheltenham in December, was Menorah, who was beaten into fourth and has since returned to novice chasing, while the third Brampour looks second or third string among Paul Nicholls’s hurdlers this season. About which more below.

Grandouet isn't Henderson's only Champion fancy. Three of the first five in the Champion Hurdle betting are trained by Henderson – he also has Spirit Son and former Champion Binocular, and both are interesting.

Spirit Son, a promising up and comer, looked very green when a fine second to Al Ferof in the Supreme Novices at Cheltenham last year, before posting the most impressive performance by any novice hurdler last season when a wide margin winner of the Grade 1 at the Aintree Grand National Festival. I’d be leaning towards a bet on him but for the fact that he hasn’t been seen in public since. Henderson said at Christmas that he was three weeks away from a run so time is running out. He’ll need to be very special indeed to go to Cheltenham without a prep run and win a Champion Hurdle in his first run out of novice company. He could well be very special but at odds of just 8/1 I’ll reluctantly pass him over.

Binocular is at the other end of the spectrum from Spirit Son. The 2010 Champion hasn’t ever really looked as brilliant as he did two years ago, and appears to be at his best now in smaller fields, as in the Christmas Hurdle at Kempton when edging past Rock On Ruby on the run to the line.

Which brings us to our selection. Rock On Ruby’s name has nothing to do with his jockey on that occasion over Christmas and he’s unlikely to have the assistance of Ruby Walsh at Cheltenham, with Ruby the man certain to ride Hurricane Fly if all goes well for the Willie Mullins inmate.

The Christmas Hurdle was Rock On Ruby’s first in Grade 1 company out of the novice arena and he should benefit from the experience. His performance in winning a handicap off top weight at Newbury on Hennessy Gold Cup day was mightily impressive, especially given that the second, his stablemate at the Nicholls yard, Empire Levant, was regarded as a handicap blot and backed into 2/1 favourite as a result, and the third, Raya Star, went on to win the hugely competitive Ladbroke Hurdle at Ascot a month later.

Raya Star was carrying 15lbs less than Rock On Ruby there. Let me engage in a form of make-believe for a moment: if Rock On Ruby had run in the Ladbroke and that form had been confirmed, he would have won that race by 10 lengths. And he would be nowhere near 12/1 in the betting for the Champion Hurdle now.

It’s not that he’s just a high-class handicapper either. Rock On Ruby was close to the top of the tree in the novice arena, only touched off by the late rally of First Lieutenant in the Neptune Investment Management Novices Hurdle (the novice Grade 1 hurdle still known to many racing followers as the SunAlliance) at Cheltenham last year.

For such a phenomenal trainer Nicholls has a poor record in the Champion – he’s never won the race and has only had one horse to run in it since 2004, Celestial Halo finishing second and fourth in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Rock On Ruby looks his best chance of ending that wait.

Recommendation:

1pt win, Rock On Ruby (12/1 generally)

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