Coneygree’s immediate future may be clarified on Thursday night but hope remains that a leg injury discovered on Wednesday may not be the end of his season. Initial reports suggested he had sustained slab fractures to both hocks but that possibility was doubted by connections of the Gold Cup winner as he awaited assessment last night.
“There’s no definite diagnosis yet,” said Sara Bradstock, one half of the husband and wife training team behind Coneygree. “There were some very exaggerated reports early this morning.
“We know he has damaged a hock,” Bradstock added, as she drove the horse to a specialist vet in Newmarket. “He’s not even that lame, just a bit stiff, but we always monitor back legs very carefully.
“They will look at him, take lots of scans and eventually make a proper diagnosis and a prognosis.” Bradstock hoped to have a clearer idea of what had gone wrong by Thursday night.
“He had a little stress fracture that kept him off the track before [in 2012] and I think everyone overreacts because of that. There may be another fracture but it’s definitely nothing very serious or displaced. He will come back, it’s just a question of when.”
The injury means Coneygree will miss the chance to run in either the King VI Chase at Kempton or Leopardstown’s Lexus Chase, the Christmas races between which the Bradstocks had yet to make a choice when the news broke. They are not ready to say he will also be prevented from attempting a second Gold Cup win in March, although a hock injury of any gravity would make that a doubtful proposition.
“It’s annoying because he worked so well the other day,” Bradstock said. “He’s worked and schooled brilliantly in the last few days.” She added she did not know what could have caused the injury, which appears unrelated to the soreness in a hind foot that led to her horse missing the Hennessy last month.
Coneygree had been a 7-1 shot for the King George and the Gold Cup. Don Cossack is 5-2 favourite for the Kempton race from 11-4, half a point shorter than Vautour. Djakadam is the 5-1 favourite for the Gold Cup from 6-1, while Coneygree was trading at over 60-1 on Betfair’s exchange for the Cheltenham race.
Willie Mullins, trainer of Vautour and Djakadam, expressed his sympathy for the Bradstocks as he hosted a pre-King George media event at his yard near Carlow. “We’re all only one gallop away from the same position, something going wrong,” the Irishman said. “I cross my fingers every morning I come out my back door that one of them’s not walking round for me to have to check.
“That’s the big dread, that your stable stars get a knock, because if you get a knock now it’s very hard to get them back. Never mind Kempton, getting them ready for the springtime, if you have to take a month off, I don’t know if you can get them back, really.
“The small yard with a big horse which consumes every waking moment, I know what it’s like. When we were small and had only one horse, to have that horse go out is a huge disappointment. We’re in a lucky position, we have one or two more. It’s very tough for a small yard and we feel for them.”
Mullins expressed satisfaction with Vautour’s King George preparation and said the horse had shown the benefit of his seasonal reappearance at Ascot last time. Regarding Faugheen, the odds-on favourite for Kempton’s Christmas Hurdle, Mullins does not expect a repeat of the awkward hanging he showed in defeat last month, which the trainer took to be a symptom of fatigue on his first run for six months.
