Bradstock scaling new heights with H D’OR

Trainer’s son attempts to add Olympia puissance to his Horse of the Year Show title on giant grey

Mark and Sara Bradstock have a big week coming up, with Coneygree due to run in the King George on Boxing Day. Before that, however, their son Alfie will attempt to win tomorrow night’s puissance at Olympia International Horse Show on the massive grey, H D’OR.

Some of the very well read among you might remember that so convinced was Charlie Brooks on the grounds of Alfie’s maternal pedigree – Lord Oaksey, Sara Bradstock – that he would be the next Sir AP Mccoy, he named the champion jockey in his novel Citizen after the boy wonder.

For the very few who did not read Citizen, a Russian champion racehorse owned by an unsavoury oligarch came over to Ascot but bolted with the fictional Bradstock before collapsing from a heart attack.

The real Alfie Bradstock’s racing career was as eventful, but rather less successful. Even though he was babysat as a child by 2011 Hennessy Gold Cup winner Carruthers, he had one ride under Rules and about five in point-topoints but, after puncturing his lung in his first race, he was “always rather too wet after that” and his sister, Lily, is the jockey in the family these days.

There is nothing remotely wet about what Bradstock and H D’OR will be attempting tomorrow night though. At the Horse of the Year Show in Birmingham earlier this year he shared first prize in the puissance with Guy Williams after both cleared a 7ft 3in wall.

Bradstock spent six years as an ‘apprentice’ show jumper working for Graham and Tina Fletcher, but as the Fletcher’s own boys, Will and Ollie, started coming through, Bradstock decided to go it alone at the start of the year.

The HOYS puissance apart, he was runner-up in another class there and has won a couple of classes in the main ring at Hickstead, which is the equivalent of a couple of Cheltenham Festival winners so, in a way, going it alone has been the making the him.

H D’OR is so big and has such a long stride that he tends to get in a muddle with the distances between fences around the smaller classes and, indeed, he finds the first round of the puissance, where there are a couple of modest 5ft 6in fences, seven strides apart, more trying than the later rounds, when it is just the wall.

The 11-year-old was originally bought for his owner, Darragh Magner, who had come over from Ireland to ride for the Fletchers at the same time as Bradstock. “But Darragh’s got brains,” said Bradstock, 24, “and realised his talent might be better placed elsewhere, so went off to get a proper job.”

So Brooks might have been more prophetic than he imagined after all; right champion, wrong sport.

Susannah Gill, a point-to-point rider who is now director of communications for Alizeti, a 25 per cent owner of the Tote, started running to get fit in 2008. Now, 40 marathons and a few ultras later, she is a veteran and completed a marathon on both Saturday and Sunday of last week.

Yesterday was a day off – only six miles before breakfast – but Gill, 34, will run another brace of marathons today and tomorrow and this is just the training for the World Marathon Challenge, when she and 39 others will run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, starting on Jan 31 in Antarctica.

That is a Thursday. On Friday it will be Cape Town, Perth on Saturday, Dubai on Sunday, Madrid on Monday, Santiago on Tuesday and Miami on Wednesday. Talk about running to catch a plane – they all have eight hours to complete each 26.2 miles, although Gill’s PB is 2hr 58min and she reckons that you can comfortably walk a marathon in eight hours.

“I thought if I didn’t do the 777 I would wake up in 30 years wondering why I hadn’t,” she said. “But a sensible part of my brain tells me I’m nuts. The training at the moment is just to make sure I can do them back-to-back.”

The hardest part is the bit in between, the flying, when there is plenty of time to stiffen up, but runners and a support team will be in a chartered plane where, she reckons, the seats are more “premium economy” than economy. She is doing it for Sports Aid and has a justgiving.com page.

So, in stark contrast to jockeys this Christmas, Gill is trying to pile on the weight and eat as much as possible. “I’ve been told ‘less toffee crisps – more slow-burning carbs’.”