Countdown to CHELTENHAM Just TWO days to go
IT IS World Book day and champion jockey Richard Johnson has two excited Harry Potters buzzing around his kitchen before they head off to school. Both Willow, eight, and Caspar, five, sport rather impressive Hogwarts outfits their father bought, not inexpensively he feels, in a local supermarket.
Caspar, with Harry’s trademark Voldemort-inflicted red scar drawn on forehead by mum Fiona, flourishes a replica plastic wand as three-year-old Percy demands dad’s attention. But if that plastic wand could conjure real-life spells, it is easy to guess what Johnson would wish for going into next week’s Cheltenham Festival: solid gold.
When Johnson rides Colin Tizzardtrained Native River in the Cheltenham Gold Cup on Friday, he will have his best chance of winning for 17 years, since he partnered Looks Like Trouble, trained by his future father-in-law Noel Chance, to beat Florida Pearl by five lengths in 2000.
It was his one win in the race and Johnson smiles as he notes the success was ‘worryingly almost a generation ago’. Only Ruby Walsh among his riding rivals is still competing over jumps. At the time, it was a third Festival success for Johnson, now 39, and within three years he had collected two of the Festival’s other blue riband races, the 2002 Queen Mother Champion Chase on Flagship Uberalles and 2003 Champion Hurdle with Rooster Booster, both trained by long-time ally Philip Hobbs.
Looks Like Trouble, still sprightly and active at 25 years old, is living out his retirement at Johnson’s Herefordshire home but, since those glory days at the turn of the century, the biggest Festival prizes have been elusive for his rider.
Johnson’s haul of 20 Festival successes is still pretty impressive; only four men have ridden more. But rather like his great retired rival Sir Anthony McCoy, churning out winners on an industrial basis is no guarantee of Festival glory.
Johnson’s last two Festivals have been winless — his last success being Fingal Bay in the 2014 Pertemps Hurdle — and his 2016 haul was two third places.
Johnson said: ‘Our Festival record was the one thing me and AP could abuse each other about. We could not really moan to anyone else because we were riding probably twice as many winners.
‘At the time he was riding bundles of winners for JP McManus. It just shows no matter how many good horses you buy or how big the stable you ride for, you need a bit of luck as well.
‘I’d hope I’m realistic rather than optimistic or pessimistic. All you can do is make the horses you ride perform the best you can. I had it getting the ride on Looks Like Trouble. I had not ridden him before the Gold Cup but there was a fall-out between [previous jockey]