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CUE CARD WILL not run again this season after the discovery of a minor stress fracture of the pelvis.
Trainer Colin Tizzard had ruled his charge out of running at next week’s Cheltenham festival last week with what was though to be pulled muscles, but after further tests, the fracture was discovered, ruling the eight-year-old out for the remainder of this season.
Last season’s Ryanair Chase winner and the winner of the Champion Bumper back in 2010, had made a successful step up to three miles earlier in the season with an impressive victory in the Betfair Chase at Haydock in November and followed that up with a fine second to leading Gold Cup hope Silviniaco Conti in the King George VI Chase over Christmas.
Those performances had given connections belief that a pop at the Gold Cup was realistic and Tizzard stated that it was a big blow to his team approaching the Festival but it could have been much worse.
“It’s only small. We sent him up to Newbury for a bone scan,” Tizzard told Racing UK.
“We were getting nowhere. When we said he wasn’t going to run (at Cheltenham) we stopped riding him then. The week before that one day he’d be sound and the next he wasn’t.
“We said it must be muscle – the physio said it was muscle, the vet said it was muscle, so we assumed that’s what it was. It’s a good job we did what we did. If we had given him a spin on a good day, God knows what could have happened
“It’s only a small fracture and the prognosis is a month in the box, then the walker and hack round for three weeks then he’ll go out in the field and we’ll have him back at the normal time for next season.
“It’s a gut wrencher really. You try to say it’s only a horse and there are worse things in life, but expectations were high for all of us. We’ve had some brilliant days with him and hopefully we can have a few more.”
