L.Hyslop SL article. Music to my ears. Lets hope her inbox isn't full of screeching offendables.
When hearing of Jefferson’s plans for Waiting Patiently, however, we must not of course indulge in the collective amnesia that overlooks the fistful of objections she raised against running in the Ryanair last season, when the horse was thriving.
Back then she was concerned about Cheltenham’s undulating track, whether the ground would be sufficiently testing, his propensity for novicey errors and his need for greater time between races than recovery from winning the Grade One Ascot Chase in mid-February would have permitted.
As the clock ticks on this season – which started belatedly for him due to a slow recovery from a setback but while the ground was unsuitably quick anyway – the worry is that at least two of those four objections risk being equally valid this time around and one of them, the going, perhaps a bigger issue.
The ground was unusually soft at last year’s Festival. As I suggested in the first Road of this series, if connections were ever going to run at Cheltenham on their professed terms, that “may have been the gift horse” they looked squarely at.