Will he or won’t he?
Hardly ever before in the history of this, the blue riband of steeplechase racing, has a horse both divided and united opinion in equal measure.
Having trained Best Mate to victory on three occasions Henrietta Knight could reasonably regarded as something of a Gold Cup expert. While agreeing Paul Nicholls’ horse is “the class horse in the field,” she does add the rider that “his jumping does leave a lot to be desired.”
Ted Walsh, father of Kauto’s jockey Ruby and something of an expert himself is typically blunt in his assessment: “If he doesn’t hit the deck and can survive those fences, then nothing can beat him.”
Another reasonably secure pair of hands when it comes to expertise is Mike Dillon, the public face of Ladbrokes for some 30 years now and only too well aware of the liabilities his firm faces if the race favourites does win. He says unequivocally “without doubt he’s the best horse in the race,” but adds ominously that the connections will “have their hearts in their mouths for 22 fences.”
Bob Champion, the cancer survivor who rode the crocked Aldaniti to victory in the Gold Cup, is the only dissenting voice of our expert quartet and he reckons that Exotic Dancer is a shoo-in. “The fences are there to be jumped and Kauto Star won’t jump them. Kauto might be a great horse, but I think he’s too special for this race and he will be found out because he’s too classy and he’s got too much speed. Exotic Dancer ticks all the right boxes for me.”
Dillon concurs that Jonjo O’Neill’s charge is the class of the field apart from Kauto Star and says that with three wins around Cheltenham under his belt already this season, he cannot be dismissed.
“The thing is,” he adds, “something has to go wrong for Kauto Star for anything else to win – and State of Play cannot be ruled out either – and the problem there is that he seems to get a mental aberration every now and then and the problem is that it usually comes as a shock to Ruby.
“So far both the horse and Ruby have coped, but you’d have to wonder when they won’t,” Dillon adds. “The bottom line here – and I say this in the full knowledge that Kauto will be a very bad loser for us if he does win – is that he is the classiest horse in the field. Fair play to his connections because he hasn’t missed a dance so far this season and he’s not going to miss this one either. If he stands up, he wins.”
Ted Walsh points to the fact that great horses like Wayward Lad, Pendil and One Man were all touted as the best of their generation at one stage or other, but they never won a Gold Cup.
“Kauto Star is undoubtedly the best horse of his generation, but that does not guarantee he’ll win either. His jumping has proved suspect as we saw in the King George and in his last race at Newbury, but the thing is that he hasn’t fallen.
“There does seem to be a problem with his concentration, but I have no idea what it is that causes it – what it is that gets to him. He’s the best horse in the race, no doubts, but I don’t know if he’s just clever or a survivor. We’ll only find that out in the four minutes or so after the tapes go up.”
Henrietta Knight admits to having been “terribly impressed” by the fact that Kauto has won over so many varied distances, but she reckons that “if you trained him, you’d be dead worried about him in a Gold Cup. Best Mate was a machine when it came to Cheltenham because he never met his fences wrong, but you have to remember that the last horse before him to win three Gold Cups was Arkle and he was inclined to part the birch every now and then. So, maybe Kauto can get away with it too.”
She agrees that Exotic Dancer is the only other really classy horse in the field. “The rest of them are what could be described as a good generation of three mile chasers, but the thing is that they do not have the class of Exotic Dancer or Kauto Star.”
