Colm O'Connell Un De Sceaux is so accustomed to his trips to Sandown, Ascot, Cheltenham and Auteuil that he could make the journey on his own at this stage. Of his 23 wins, 10 have been Grade 1s and he has won those Grade 1s at five different tracks. It is faintly ridiculous that this horse who pulls as hard as he has done for eight years is lining up for a Tingle Creek on the verge of turning 12, against the likes of Defi Du Seuil, who is nearly half his age. That this is the case is down to the whole team at Willie Mullins’s but primarily to Willie and Virginie Bascop. When he won the Red Mills Hurdle five and a half years ago, the pressure was huge to send him to the Champion Hurdle but we left that decision to Willie. He said we could go to Cheltenham but we wouldn’t have a horse the following year and that we’d be better to skip that and go to France, where he’d get a bit of an education for chasing too as their hurdles are mini-fences. That long-term vision is a key reason why Un De Sceaux is still racing now. And then there’s Virginie. She has been with him since Willie bought him in France for us. She has dedicated six years of her life to him. She has been central to getting him to relax better in his races, though that is a relative term. She went off with Niamh in the one-horse van on Thursday with the little horse in the back and the dream alive. When racing is over on Saturday, they will be driving back all night with him. That’s the unreal dedication that people forget about. My father, Eddie has long been a follower of horse racing and he passed it onto all of us. He had a couple of nice point-to-pointers with Trevor Horgan. He decided he would like a better class of horse and we’ve been very lucky. Turban won a Dan Moore Chase. Then he asked Willie to find him a festival horse and he delivered in spades with Un De Sceaux. It was a remarkable piece of luck. Willie vetted four or five horses and they all failed. Un De Sceaux was number six or something. You need luck but you trust that man. We all see the money horses make, hundreds of thousands. We didn’t have that. We got a call from Willie saying he’d found a horse for us that had passed the vet and a wire transfer was needed. We did it in an hour. That was our involvement. We couldn’t take any credit for it. When you’re looking for a nice horse, you’re going to get what Willie thinks is a nice horse and that’s half the battle. He has given us so many highs since, at Cheltenham, Punchestown, Leopardstown, Ascot — will another horse, not to mind an Irish horse, ever win three Clarence House Chases in a row again? — Auteuil, Sandown. His performance in pushing Altior so hard in last year’s Tingle Creek was one of his best performances. Ruby Walsh said afterwards that Un De Sceaux gave it everything and there wasn’t anything else they could have done. People thought he had his ground but he didn’t. The rain came too late and it was only on the surface, it hadn’t gotten into the ground. Hopefully they get plenty of rain in Sandown but at least there’s a chase on before it and that might make it a little more testing. I find it strange that Paul Nicholls and Philip Hobbs, who train Politologue and Defi Du Seuil, want the grand to come up soft and for Un De Sceaux to show up and make it a test of stamina. It’s certainly what Un De Sceaux wants too. It’s a strong race and I don’t know what will happen. But we’re well into bonus territory now with Un De Sceaux and we’ll take it a race at the time. We sort of thought after Cheltenham last year that we might retire him after France but then he won at Punchestown and so we put him away. He is still loving life and wanting to race and he has defied all the odds. I don’t think even Willie understands why he’s still going now. He calls him ‘The Iron Horse’ and a lot of people in Closutton have a real emotional attachment to him. That extends to the general racing public too because of his longevity. And that longevity is down to Willie and Virginie. We can never thank them enough.
