No hurdles were jumped in the home straight at Ascot on Friday, the first setback for the new padded hurdles gradually being rolled out around the country
No hurdles were jumped in the home straight here on Friday, causing a certain amount of bottled up frustration among the training community and amounting to a first setback for the new padded hurdles gradually being rolled out around the country. Officials here hope that all obstacles will be jumpable for today’s much more high-profile card but that will depend on wind and a refined method of setting the hurdles into the ground.
“It’s just disappointing,” said Paul Nicholls after his Danny Kirwan was second in the Supreme Trial, “when you’ve got a Grade Two novice hurdle and you’ve only got four flights of hurdles. I just said to Harry Cobden, if the bloody hurdles had been there, that might have helped us a bit. But it’s nobody’s fault.”
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Eight months after retiring from the saddle, Katie Walsh is once more part of a plot to bag a major British jumps race. Baie Des Iles, trained by her husband, Ross O’Sullivan, is being lined up for next week’s Welsh Grand National and has shortened to a general 12-1 in recent days as punters begin to see possibilities in the grey mare, last sighted in this country when giving Walsh her final spin around Aintree in the National itself.
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