Cheltenham trainer Kim Bailey has confirmed Trelawne will head to the Ultima Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival if the ground is soft enough.
The yard are bidding to win the race for successive years after Chianti Classico’s 2024 victory, a race which has been won in the past by the likes of Grand National Winner Corach Rambler, and Grade 2 Peter Marsh winner Vintage Clouds.
“Trelawne will head to the Ultima if the ground is soft.” Bailey confirmed. “Brenda’s Asking’s owner will decide if she heads to the Mares’ Novice or not. Moon Rocket and Destroytheevidence have entries but are unlikely to go to the festival.”
“The Kemble Brewery is in good form; he’ll head to Sandown on the Saturday before Cheltenham. We’ve given Does He Know a bit of a break, he had a difficult race the other day, he hated the ground at Exeter, it was very gluey, so we are a little bit stuck on what to do next.
“Hopefully we’ll get him back out before the end of March.
“We have a lot of nice horses who haven’t quite done their bit yet this season. “
The team suffered a major setback at Cheltenham’s December meeting when Chianti Classico suffered a career threatening injury in the feature Grade 3 contest.
Bailey provided an update on his stable star: “He’s absolutely fine, he’s being led out of the stables every day and re-hab is going well. He will make a full recovery, but he will likely never be the same as a racehorse. Of all the things that have happened to me as a trainer, that was the thing that hurt me most.
“He was going to win that day he got injured and if he did, he’d be second favourite for the Gold Cup and we’d be sat here getting very excited ahead of Cheltenham. I’m hoping we can get him back to do something, maybe get him back to win a Foxhunters. “
He continued: “The season so far has gone perfectly adequately, we had a good time up to Christmas, which seems to happen every season and then we give all the horses their flu jabs and things go hideously wrong.
“We’ve had two seconds in Grade two’s, which they probably should have been closer to winning and another few seconds elsewhere.
“Finishing second does not put me in a good mood because you get murdered by the handicapper and no one remembers who finished second.”
“We spend a lot of time looking at the programme book and it can be incredibly frustrating when we have a race in mind for a couple of weeks and then the ground goes against us.
“We had a horse called Broomfield Present entered last week, who wants bottomless ground, and it appears to have rained everywhere apart from where we want it.”
