Mall Dini and Davy Russell after winning the 2016 Pertemps at Cheltenham© Photo Healy Racing
I’m just delighted to be going to Cheltenham with a couple of very nice horses, Presenting Percy and Mall Dini, trained by a very good friend Pat Kelly, and both are the head of their respective markets although in a sense I would probably prefer if they were outsiders as there wouldn’t be as much hype about them!
Obviously the ground is going to be a factor this week and it is not what we would have been expecting coming over here but I hope the punters, whoever backed them, are right.
On their best form they have to have a chance. Presenting Percy has done well and Mall Dini, if he put it together I think we’ve got to have a great chance off last year's run.
Having gone through the Kim Muir in as much detail as I have, I can’t see that it is any stronger a race this year than it was last year. That might be proved wrong but I see it as a very similar sort of contest to last year and with a bit of luck in running this year you never know.
Presenting Percy comes here after running at Gowran Park and of course I’d have preferred if he had won but I don’t think there was any shame in getting beat by a horse like Our Duke. I know people were suggesting that it was too short for Our Duke but it was too short for Percy too. We were getting 7lbs off him as well but our fella is a novice and I’m taking some heart from what finished behind us in that race in Gowran as there were good horses there. Percy did get too close to the last, I’m not saying it would have made a difference because I thought Our Duke was brilliant over the last three and maybe he’d have won further if there was another couple of fences to jump but I wasn’t at all disappointed.
People have questioned why Percy has gone the route that he has but I don’t need to question Pat Kelly. I think he’d have learned more at Gowran Park than he would have in something like the Ten Up at Navan, lying up with the likes of Our Duke rather than lying up with a bunch of novices.
People have spoken about his Grade 1 runs and you’d have to say Percy has ran in two Grade 1 races and disappointed in both of them, I could sit here and write excuses all day long as to why I wouldn’t read too much into either of those two runs but it is in the book and if you go by the formbook he doesn’t have it.
We haven’t gone the traditional route to the RSA but Pat gives me his reasoning behind the races he has picked and I have yet to find fault in any of them. If you were to ask me to explain why Pat decided to run in a race like the Porterstown over three and a half miles, I think Pat feels it takes a very, very tough horse to win a RSA. I think a horse that wins a RSA has to stay a minimum of three miles and maybe even further. He knows where we stand now with the trip, he knows he is a tough horse because he has come out of novice company twice during the year, and that was Pat’s plan to sharpen him up. He has ticked a lot of boxes going to Cheltenham.
Pat is certainly an intriguing individual but I think if you look at the way he has trained his horses, he is extremely patient, he doesn’t have many horses but he does know them inside out and he knows the ones that have naturally ability and it is worth taking their time with them.
My love of racing came from my father, Albert, bringing us off to Galway for our summer holidays from a young age. We couldn’t really escape it and it has rubbed off on the family in varying degrees but some of us are deeply involved in it and I love it. Dad certainly left love of racing behind him anyway.
Dad would have been involved in different horses over the years and would have been involved in some horses with lads from the Dáil in a few syndicates and they had a couple of horses with Noel Meade and he had a couple of nice horses with Charlie Swan, one of which was called Sorry Al.
The boys in the Dáil bought him and I think there was eight involved in him. They sent around an eighth of the bill to everyone that was involved and I think Dad was Taoiseach at the time but whatever happened, Dad forgot to pay his share originally so when it came to name the horse the lads decided to call him Sorry Al and the horse went on and won at Galway one day and who was leading him back in only Al himself and I don’t think the boys had the heart to tell him he hadn’t payed for his leg!
It was fantastic to own a few horses with him and now I suppose it has turned to owning Presenting Percy with my wife, Ann, who I gave her as a present after Mall Dini won two years ago. Ann missed Mall Dini winning as she was back in Birmingham Airport on the way home so I told her she’d never miss it again and told her she could have Presenting Percy… I don’t think I’ll make that mistake again!!!
