Blake's blog
It was the race we’d all hoped for. Old versus young. Proven star quality versus star potential.
Hurricane Fly and Our Conor eyeballed each other over the last hurdle, with Our Conor looking set to grab the Irish hurdling torch from the great champion, but The Fly wasn’t ready to give it up just yet and battled ferociously to forge away in the closing stages and finish well on top at the line.
What more can be said about Hurricane Fly? It wasn’t his best display in visual terms by any means, but when you examine the performance, taking into account that his connections stressed just how difficult a week Hurricane Fly had with a bruised foot, his effort looks all the more impressive.
The vanquished Our Conor is clearly going the right way. He was 1lb worse off with Hurricane Fly relative to the Ryanair, but that didn’t stop him giving the champ a mighty scare.
On Sunday he had an excellent chance to beat Hurricane Fly. He stalked the champion all the way, was delivered at just the right moment by Danny Mullins and out-jumped his rival at the last, but he couldn’t master him on the run-in and was ultimately well held. Considering he seemed to relish every aspect of the Cheltenham test last season, Our Conor’s connections will no doubt be relishing the prospect of having a third crack at Hurricane Fly on the biggest stage next month.
The only unsatisfactory element to the race, as was the case in the Ryanair Hurdle, was the ride given to Jezki. I wasn’t alone in being extremely surprised that A.P. McCoy opted to drop Jezki in last of all, given that he had been caught out for a lack of tactical pace in the Ryanair and has proven he stays further. As it transpired, he could only find the one pace in the closing stages, but there is every chance that he was made look slower than he is due to the combination of being the most poorly-positioned runner in the race and the testing ground not suiting.
So, what about the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham? For me, the race couldn’t be teed up any better. Hurricane Fly is undoubtedly the standard bearer and deserves to be favourite but, with niggling doubts surrounding his ability to show his very best at Cheltenham, there will be no shortage of rivals lining up to have a crack at the title.
The horse who enhanced his credentials the most has to be Our Conor. He travelled best of all, jumped as well as ever and promises to improve again at Cheltenham. Also, it would be ill advised to forget about Jezki. While he now has a bit to prove, things haven’t gone right in his last two starts and a stronger pace coupled with a sounder surface in the Champion Hurdle could well see him improve and he doesn’t have much ground to make up on his aforementioned two rivals.
A Champion Hurdle with those three contenders would be intriguing enough, but add the British challenge of The New One and My Tent Or Yours into the mix, not to mention the potential participation of a certain lady called Annie Power and the freight train that is Un De Sceaux and what you have is the deepest Champion Hurdle in quite a few years, a race that promises to be the highlight of the entire Cheltenham Festival.
never laid anything off.
