Cheltenham Wed, 11th Mar, 2020  Dame De Compagnie There is a long way to go to go, but you are getting into the realms of, ‘I don’t believe it’ type of thing. You certainly couldn’t believe Champ. She is a lovely mare this and she is tough. It is always a very competitive race, but she was very good. There wasn’t that head-long Coral dash you normally get with a lot of horses flat to the boards, there were a lot of horses travelling and coming down the hill — anything could have won. To be fair we thought we had reasonable grounds to appeal and we did win it, but I’m not going to harp on about that as I don’t want that to be the headline news. The handicapper thought (her rise) was fair, we thought it was a bit unfair and it saved us a couple of pounds which was probably quite important. In that sort of field you have to have a bit of luck and you have to be in the right place at the right time to get the breaks. She was good enough and she had the gears as well. She is a lovely, big mare and she would jump a fence, but she is tough and I think that is the main thing, you have to be in races like that.

Cheltenham Wed, 11th Mar, 2020  Champ It didn’t look very likely to happen, did it? It looked like he was going to be an honourable third — I was watching the front two and all of a sudden he appeared in the picture. I was thinking, ‘how has he got here?’. He was 100-1 at the second-last and what price was he at the last? We had the Might Bite thing in this race a few years ago, so you’d have to say it’s been a strange race for me.