Whisky faces Cheltenham test Nicky Henderson admits Oscar Whisky needs to win at Cheltenham on Saturday to confirm his status as a Grade One performer. He contests the Unicoin Homes Relkeel Hurdle after falling when upsides Overturn at the last in the Coral Ascot Hurdle on his reappearance. The trainer said: "Ascot was unfortunate but if you take it in the context of what happened a week later with Overturn and Binocular and you have to say Oscar Whisky was running a tremendous race that day. "I'm not going to say he would have won but it was going to be very tight and we were giving him eight pounds so in terms of Oscar Whisky it was going to be a very good performance whatever happened. "Now we're coming back to two-and-a-half miles without an Overturn so he'd need to be nearly winning this to prove himself top class." Henderson admits he is torn over what spring target to hand his star but a clash with Big Buck's in the Ladbrokes World Hurdle remains a mouthwatering possibility. "We're still just hesitating over his prime distance. It probably is around the two-and-a-half mile mark. We did have a thought of going up to three miles to have a look at Big Buck's or go back to two miles. He'll certainly do that after this for the Welsh Champion Hurdle for the obvious reason that Dai Walters, who owns the horse, also owns the racecourse Ffos Las," he said. "He's got to stay, if he stays three miles I genuinely think he'll be a threat (to Big Buck's) because he'd be a three miler with a right turn of foot. Whether he'll stay or not is a completely different matter and there's a lot of horses who've been trying to beat Big Buck's for the last few years and they've all failed. "They've either not been good enough or not stayed. At least one good thing about this horse is if he did stay three miles he'd have a serious chance of beating him because he has a gear. Whether he has that gear at the end of three miles, we don't know yet though."
