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Detroit City

Champion Hurdle, Cheltenham

Hellllo

All Time Great Lays

It is always difficult for five-year-old hurdlers in the Champion Hurdle. They have spent the previous season as juveniles competing largely against their contemporaries, and when they have ventured into all-aged competition they have been in receipt of a generous weight allowance. Hurdlers compete off level weights against their elders when they leave their juvenile season behind despite the fact that, until this year, five-year-old chasers had always been in receipt of a weight allowance. The

Perhaps this is why, when Detroit City lined up for the Champion Hurdle in 2007, no five-year-old had won the Champion Hurdle since See You Then won the first of his three in 1985. No fewer than 71 had tried, including horses of the calibre of Kribensis, Hors La Loi, Deep Sensation, Celtic Chief and Katarino. Detroit City had a massive stat to overcome, and still they sent him off as the 6-4 favourite.

True, he had been an impressive Triumph Hurdle winner in 2006 and he had put in a couple of quality performances during the 2006/07 season, but it was possible to pick holes. The Greatwood Hurdle that he won off top weight was one of the worst Greatwood Hurdles of recent times, and when he beat Hardy Eustace by a length in the Bula Hurdle, it was a wholly unsatisfactory affair, a game of cat and mouse between the two that had turned into a sprint. His victory over Straw Bear in the Agfa Hurdle at odds of 1-3 on his Cheltenham prep was more workmanlike than impressive, and the fact that he had won the Cesarewitch the previous October, a two-and-a-quarter-mile handicap on the flat, suggested that he might have been more of a stayer over hurdles than a two-mile speedster.

And it wasn’t as if the opposition was weak. We may have been getting towards the latter stages of a golden era for two-mile hurdlers, but common perception was that we were still in the thick of it, with the champions of the previous three seasons, Brave Inca and Hardy Eustace, back for more, as well as young bucks Straw Bear, Iktitaf and Sublimity.

Unfortunately, there was a hugely unsatisfactory conclusion to this one. We never really got a chance to see if Detroit City was up to it. He never travelled. He jumped the second flight, the one in front of the stands, like he had never seen a hurdle before, and Richard Johnson was urging him into the bridle going around the turn that took them out on their final circuit. It was obvious long before he started losing touch at the top of the hill that his goose was cooked “Johnson said that he knew he was beaten going to the first flight” and he trailed home a sorry and disappointing sixth, some 20 lengths behind the winner, Sublimity.

A sad post-script to the race is that, on his seasonal debut the following November, in the Coral Hurdle at Ascot, Detroit City fell at the second flight and was killed. While 6-4 about him for the Champion Hurdle as a five-year-old was way too short, it was a real shame that he never got to realise his true potential.

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