Ascot's pre-Christmas two day fixture has grown over the years in stature, but today's card was on a par with what we can expect at Kempton over Christmas - truly a superb range of races and highly competitive with it. In a way that only Ascot can achieve, it stages a very valuable card with seemingly no effort. You find yourself asking how they would approach the King George meeting if they ever got their hands on it; it could be huge.
Two men from Barbury have good cause to be chuffed with Ascot's endeavour today. The closing race of the day, formerly introduced 25 years or more ago as the Ladbroke, now goes under the title of the Betfair Exchange Trophy, but as hot 2m handicap hurdles go, it's right up there. And the good news is that for this type of horse, the enhanced value of next month's Lanzarote Hurdle at Kempton, announced as a £100,000 hurdle this week, the choices of lucrative handicap to aim for are multiplying. The County Hurdle may be run at the Festival, but it's some way off the valuie of these two and the Betfair Hurdle at Newbury in February.
Four year old hurdler Tritonic has shown plenty of promise since winning the Adonis last year, and was well fancied to add to Alan King's Festival record. He was a distant fifth to Quixilos in the JCB Triumph Hurdle and second to Supreme Novices fancy I Like to Move It in a graded Novices Hurdle at Cheltenham last month. Today, he found his moment in the most valuable handicap hurdle of the winter yet, to win by 2 3/4l from a neighbour, trained over the hill at Burderop. Neil King's Onemorefortheroad led two out but was headed at the final flight and kept on gamely. Both trainers should be proud of their charges for producing a terrific race.
The top end of the Jumps game is increasingly polarized between big spending owners supporting what seems an ever-smaller group of elite trainers with enormous strings. The nature of training at the top nowadays requires both a huge number of horses running for you, and equally eye-watering sums spent on young stock.
The latest youngster sold into Nicky Henderson's is an Irish Point-to-Point winner from Borris, Wexford, last Sunday called Jet Powered, sold for a staggering 350,000 guineas. The sums paid bear no relation to the ability of any horse to recoup that expenditure, but they do illustrate the potency of desire to win at the highest level.
This translates all the way down the food chain to events like last Sunday's International Point-to-Point, where Irish Throughbred Markting Young Horse Maiden winner Western Zephyr will be sold tomorrow in an online auction by Thoroughbid. Whilst a sum like that of Jet Powered is fanciful, something ion the range of £30-40,000 is not unreasonable, and an indication of the growing presence of British-trained Pointers amongst Rules horses in training.
Ascot's pre-Christmas two day fixture has grown over the years in stature, but today's card was on a par with what we can expect at Kempton over Christmas - truly a superb range of races and highly competitive with it. In a way that only Ascot can achieve, it stages a very valuable card with seemingly no effort. You find yourself asking how they would approach the King George meeting if they ever got their hands on it; it could be huge.
Two men from Barbury have good cause to be chuffed with Ascot's endeavour today. The closing race of the day, formerly introduced 25 years or more ago as the Ladbroke, now goes under the title of the Betfair Exchange Trophy, but as hot 2m handicap hurdles go, it's right up there. And the good news is that for this type of horse, the enhanced value of next month's Lanzarote Hurdle at Kempton, announced as a £100,000 hurdle this week, the choices of lucrative handicap to aim for are multiplying. The County Hurdle may be run at the Festival, but it's some way off the valuie of these two and the Betfair Hurdle at Newbury in February.
Four year old hurdler Tritonic has shown plenty of promise since winning the Adonis last year, and was well fancied to add to Alan King's Festival record. He was a distant fifth to Quixilos in the JCB Triumph Hurdle and second to Supreme Novices fancy I Like to Move It in a graded Novices Hurdle at Cheltenham last month. Today, he found his moment in the most valuable handicap hurdle of the winter yet, to win by 2 3/4l from a neighbour, trained over the hill at Burderop. Neil King's Onemorefortheroad led two out but was headed at the final flight and kept on gamely. Both trainers should be proud of their charges for producing a terrific race.
The top end of the Jumps game is increasingly polarized between big spending owners supporting what seems an ever-smaller group of elite trainers with enormous strings. The nature of training at the top nowadays requires both a huge number of horses running for you, and equally eye-watering sums spent on young stock.
The latest youngster sold into Nicky Henderson's is an Irish Point-to-Point winner from Borris, Wexford, last Sunday called Jet Powered, sold for a staggering 350,000 guineas. The sums paid bear no relation to the ability of any horse to recoup that expenditure, but they do illustrate the potency of desire to win at the highest level.
This translates all the way down the food chain to events like last Sunday's International Point-to-Point, where Irish Throughbred Markting Young Horse Maiden winner Western Zephyr will be sold tomorrow in an online auction by Thoroughbid. Whilst a sum like that of Jet Powered is fanciful, something ion the range of £30-40,000 is not unreasonable, and an indication of the growing presence of British-trained Pointers amongst Rules horses in training.
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