Hobbs mystified by hot-pot flops
That Detroit City was subsequently sent for a routine drugs test after his dismal effort in the Champion Hurdle added further insult to the ignominy of his performance and Hobbs was left to travel back to Somerset to try and get to the bottom of what had happened his two vanquished heroes.
Having been introduced to the racecourse crowd in the morning as “the bullish Philip Hobbs,” – something which the quietly spoken handler denied, he was left to quietly pack his animals onto the transporter for the long journey home down the M5.
“I’m confident, not bullish,” Hobbs had told interviewer Jonathan Powell beforehand, but after both horses had failed dismally to spark in both the Arkle and the Champion Hurdle, he was more mystified than anything else.
The Arkle disappointment came first when the diminutive Fair Along failed completely to live up to his front-running form.
A false start, caused more by a fussy starter rather than over-anxious horses and jockeys, was blamed for the below par display.
“He got bumped at the start and lost his position,” Hobbs relayed later. “If they had let him go the first time he might have been alright, but he was always making up ground.”
Out of the failure, however, came a rare glimmer of racing salvation because Fair Along is entered in the Festival’s get-out race, the County Hurdle which is the final race on Friday and Hobbs thinks redemption might be found there.
“If he’s OK there’s no reason not to run him later in the week,” he reported. “We’ll see how he comes out of this.”
As he spoke those words, he was unaware he was about to be on the wrong end of a dreadful double-whammy when the heavily backed Champion Hurdle favourite ran a terrible race to finish well out of the frame behind Ireland’s surprise winner Sublimity.
“It’s very disappointing because he was the favourite and got stuffed,” Hobbs said afterwards.
“Richard (Johnson) got off and said the horse could not have been right, so we’ll have to wait and see. There’s probably something amiss, but we’ll find out in the next couple of days.”
If Hobbs was left rueing the fact that the weight of expectations had sunk both his horses, one man who was laughing on the other side of his face was Alan King the trainer of Arkle winner My Way De Solzen.
King pulled off a remarkable feat of training by getting this horse, the winner of last year’s three mile World Hurdle to come back here and win the two mile champion chase for novices.
“I bumped into (Cheltenham legend) Michael Dickinson who told me I was the biggest prat ever for going over two miles. I try to keep calm most of the time, but I can never cope when I run this horse. It doesn’t matter which race and I was probably ten times worse when we had committed to this race,” King said.
Adding that he was “just glad we got it right” he predicted that he would face the same problems next year over whether the horse should run in the two mile Champion Chase or the Gold Cup over 3m 2f.
If King’s joy was palpable, it was no more so than the dejection felt by Philip Hobbs. But then, that’s racing for you.
