There have been a few false dawns since Constitution Hill blew away a mismatched field at odds of 1-12 in last year’s Christmas Hurdle at Kempton, but now, at last, National Hunt racing’s reclusive superstar is back, and the best news of all is that this time around, he has some serious opposition too.
Nicky Henderson’s unbeaten former Champion Hurdler will be in a final field of four for this year’s Christmas Hurdle on Thursday, and with Willie Mullins’s Lossiemouth also confirmed as a runner, the King George card can be sold as a genuine double feature, arguably for the first time this century.
Boxing Day at Kempton is the only jumping afternoon outside the spring festivals at Cheltenham and Aintree with three Grade One races on the schedule, but in terms of competitiveness and excitement, the Christmas Hurdle has been a bit of a makeweight for much of the last two decades. Eight of the last 10 runnings have had an odds-on favourite, and while there is much for the purists to admire as a horse like Constitution Hill pulverises his field at short odds, it does little to quicken the pulse of more occasional racegoers and fans.
But not this year, when Kempton’s Grade One hurdle will be a head-to-head that everyone can savour and appreciate, ahead of an 11-runner King George which is also rich in potential storylines. Spillane’s Tower and Corbetts Cross will attempt to give JP McManus a first success in the race, Grey Dawning will bring back memories of Desert Orchid’s glory years, and Il Est Francais will bid to be the first French-trained winner for nearly a quarter of a century.
And if the King George is a wide-open clash of closely matched rivals, the Christmas Hurdle is a chance to see an established all-time great take on a very dangerous opponent. The five-year-old Lossiemouth has a near-perfect nine-from-10 record which includes two wins at the Cheltenham festival, and she still seems to be improving by the race. Constitution Hill, meanwhile, is the returning, undefeated champion, out of sight but certainly not of mind since this time last year, who returns to the ring amid plenty of fighting talk from his corner.In fact, there seems to be something of a siege mentality developing around Constitution Hill, not unlike the “everyone’s against us” attitude that Sir Alex Ferguson stoked so effectively in his great Manchester United teams.
“You’re all doom and gloom,” Nico de Boinville, Constitution Hill’s jockey, told the Racing Post this weekend, “but you don’t know what’s been going on, so I hope that on Boxing Day we can prove you all wrong and shut you all up.”
Michael Buckley, the gelding’s owner, weighed in too. “I listened to Ed Chamberlin, Tom Scudamore and Luke Harvey [on ITV Racing] in the dark at the end of racing yesterday, talking about ‘whether this horse can come back from injury’. Wake up guys, he’s never been injured. He had a lung infection. It’s like saying an athlete can’t come back from the flu. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
It is, perhaps, another symptom of the social media age we inhabit and the way it forces everyone to take sides, but this seems a little odd and un-Christmassy, not least because Constitution Hill is a horse and therefore oblivious to it all.
But it also implies that there are plenty of people out there who are somehow expecting, or even willing, the horse to fail, when all the evidence suggests that the exact opposite is the case. Constitution Hill’s eight races to date have already established him as one of the all-time hurdling greats, and the only thing missing has been a worthwhile opponent to push him to even greater heights. In Lossiemouth, he now seems to have a credible rival, a Sea Pigeon to his Monksfield, and punters everywhere will be itching to get Christmas Day out of the way and see them get it on.
At the same time, though, he has been through quite a lot since his last trip to Kempton. There was the lung infection which ruled him out of Cheltenham in March, a bout of colic not long after that, a wind operation in May, an exercise trip to Newbury where he was narrowly beaten by his galloping companion and then a minor training issue in November that ruled him out of the Fighting Fifth Hurdle at Newcastle.
The first hint that there was a problem ahead of Newcastle, meanwhile, came not from the stable but from the ante-post betting, as Sir Gino, his stable companion and the eventual winner of the race, replaced Constitution Hill as favourite a few hours before Henderson revealed on X that his horse had been lame since the previous day.
It is hardly surprising, given Constitution Hill’s superstar status, that racing fans and commentators alike have been concerned about his wellbeing and progress. Quite how that turns into an “us-and-them” narrative is difficult to fathom, but it will hopefully be overtaken by events if Thursday’s race proves to be as compelling on the track as it is on paper.
