LONG RUN schooled twice last week with his regular rider, Sam Waley-Cohen, and the question was whether the horse or the jockey was the one under tuition. With Barry Geraghty and AP McCoy for company and the rest of the trainer Nicky Henderson’s yard watching with a cynic’s eye, Mr S Waley-Cohen finds riding work as stressful as any race, even the Cheltenham Gold Cup. There is no room for error in either theatre.
Ask Henderson what is the big difference between the amateur and professional jockey and he will look at you with an air of bemusement that ridicules the question. It’s not just a matter of style or technique, it’s the hard edge to mind and body, the instinctive judgments made every day on the racetrack by which the gulf is measured. Henderson knows the score and gets on with it. Robert Waley-Cohen owns the horse, so his son, Sam, rides it. That’s the whole point of the exercise.
“Sam’s great,” says Henderson. “He’s pretty cool. He’s intelligent, he listens and he knows the horse.”
The strain on trainer and rider is eased by knowing that any lack of confidence above the saddle will be balanced by the surfeit of ability beneath it. The partnership banished the sceptics at Kempton Park in January when they rudely shattered Kauto Star’s dreams of a fifth successive victory in the King George VI Chase. In the rush to consign Kauto Star to the past, the implications for the future of a fine young chaser were largely ignored, though the memories of that jubilant afternoon will fortify Waley-Cohen in the long countdown to the Gold Cup, the final thundering climax of this week’s four-day Festival.
Like so many chasers from across the Channel, Long Run arrived in England with a big reputation and a designer price tag. To retrace his journey, you must go to the shores of the Atlantic, to the yard of the eccentric opera-loving Guillaume Macaire, who was once a familiar face in the Cheltenham paddock. Macaire exists by training winners, hatfuls of them, and prospers by selling his best horses to the English, often through Anthony Bromley of the Highflyer Bloodstock Agency, who can number Kauto Star and Master Minded among his more successful transfers.
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“I went down to Guillaume’s to see Long Run early in his three-year-old career,” Bromley recalls. “He didn’t make his debut until a few months later but he was massive, more like a six-year-old, and even then you could tell the aura with which he was viewed. He was a machine.”
Neither Macaire nor the breeders, Marie-Christine and Benoit Gabeur, who also bred the dual Champion Chase winner Master Minded, intended to sell another coveted asset.
Had Long Run been just another overpriced French export, Robert Waley-Cohen’s attention would have turned elsewhere. But he had owned Long Run’s brother Bica and a half-sister, Liberthine, had given the family an incalculable emotional lift shortly after the death of Tom, Sam’s younger brother, from cancer by winning the Mildmay of Flete Handicap at the Festival in 2005.
“It was the first good thing that had happened to us for a long time,” Sam recalled. The favour was not going to be forgotten. Besides, Long Run was the picture of the perfect chaser, athletic, powerful and well balanced, more in the mould of an Irish chaser than the streamlined French model. A deal was done. Long Run would be kept in training in France through his four-year-old career before moving to Lambourn and Henderson. The trainer liked what he saw. “He was a beautiful horse with great balance and great substance.”
Long Run did not take long to make his mark on this side of the Channel, flying round Kempton Park in the manner of a genuine future star to win the novice chase on the undercard of the King George in 2009. “It was the first time we knew exactly what a talented horse he was,” says Henderson, who needs three winners to equal Fulke Walwyn’s Festival record of 40 but has never won a Gold Cup.
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Sam Waley-Cohen can recall many mornings on the gallops when he struggled to master the wilful son of Cadoudal. With the help of Yogi Breisner, part jumps tutor, part horse whisperer, and a French chiropractor in London, Dr Jerome Poupel, Long Run was taught to relax.
Only the last step remains to be taken on Friday afternoon, when three Gold Cup winners — Kauto Star, Denman and Imperial Commander — await. Long Run’s two defeats round Cheltenham and the fact that no six-year-old has won the Gold Cup since Mill House in 1963 count against him. “He does have it all to prove,” says Sam Waley-Cohen. So, too, does the jockey.