Whittington feeling lucky for Festival
Henderson protege aims for a Cheltenham first Simply The Betts will go for show-jumping lesson
Like all young trainers Harry Whittington is keen to chalk up his first winner at the Cheltenham Festival and, towards that end, he not only feels that his luck at the course has finally changed for the better, but that his three runners all have good chances.
“Until this season Cheltenham was a bit of a bogey course for us because we’d only been in the unsaddling enclosure once with a fourth,” said Whittington, whose trio include Simply The Betts, favourite for the Brown Advisory, Rouge Vif in the Arkle and Saint Calvados in the Ryanair.
“But this season we’ve had two winners there, got beaten a pixel in another and only been out of the frame once, so they are running well at the course now, which is a step forward as far as I’m concerned.”
Before he took the plunge to train, Whittington, 39, ran a satellite yard for Nicky Henderson. “Though he left a lot of it to me, I learned an unbelievable amount about training and placing from him,” said Whittington. “I’d know the horses, I’d see where Nicky placed them and I learned that way.
“I’d worked before for Malcolm Bastard [the country’s leading pretrainer and sales consignor]. They both did it the Fred Winter way; looking around the horses in the evening, having the horses look well. Nicky has a brilliant way of filling their tanks for the Festival, but the biggest thing I learned was the importance of understanding each horse.
“We had My Tent Or Yours here when he was a three-year-old and I rode him in a gallop with two older horses from Seven Barrows in that November. He worked all over them and I told the guv’nor he would win a junior bumper standing on his head.
“But Nicky rang up the next day and told me to back off him because the horse was still growing and he didn’t run him for another year – that is understanding your horses.”
Whittington is putting that lesson in practice now, particularly with
Simply The Betts, who will stop for a show-jumping lesson with leading eventer Laura Collett on his way to Cheltenham on Thursday.
“He’s the unexposed novice in the race,” said Whittington. “He beat Imperial Aura at Cheltenham last time out and they were 11 lengths clear of the third, which has since won easily at Kempton, so the form looks solid.
“He’s big and long. Over hurdles he’d always kick one out of the ground if he was wrong at it, so we sent him to Laura and it made a big difference to his hurdling. But when he made a couple of mistakes chasing at Kempton at Christmas it woke me up to sending him back to her. Now he loves it and we send him for his own entertainment now.
“He’s quite a big character and we thought we’d send him on his way to Cheltenham last time, because it revs him up a bit, and [we] reckoned it would help to get his blood up. After he’d jumped Laura sent a text saying, ‘He’s squealing, he’ll win.’” Rouge Vif, who finished tamely at Cheltenham in November after which he was given a wind operation, has not done much wrong, chasing home Global Citizen at Kempton and then winning the Kingmaker at Warwick.
“We jumped off a length behind Global Citizen and were beaten a length,” said Whittington. “His big asset is his jumping, he’s very efficient and quick away from a fence and if he’s thereabout he will run through a brick wall for you.”
Saint Calvados possibly faces the hardest task in the Ryanair, but he is still relatively unexposed over the trip.
“If it’s very soft or heavy those are his conditions,” added the trainer.