IT was appropriate that, exactly 12 months after he sent out his first winner, trainer Padraig Roche recorded the first graded race win of his training career when Way Back Home won the Winning Fair Juvenile Hurdle at Fairyhouse.

Actually, Roche’s first winner was 364 days earlier, but it was on the day last year, last Saturday, on the same card. The JP McManus-owned Out Of The Loop ran out an easy winner of the Tommy Carberry Handicap Hurdle under Mark Walsh last year. That was Roche’s first winner, his only National Hunt winner last season.

He has kicked on this season. Way Back Home is the star of the stable, his first graded winner, but the son of Power was bringing up Roche’s 11th win of the season on Saturday. The trainer is putting together a nice team of horses.

Way Back Home is a really likeable and progressive individual. Peter Comerford’s horse ran a big race to finish third behind Gardens Of Babylon and Surin in the three-year-old maiden hurdle at Punchestown on New Year’s Eve, in a race that is working out really well. The winner and runner-up finished second and first respectively in a winners’ race at Fairyhouse in January, well clear of La Sorelita, and they finished second and third behind Sir Erec in the Grade 1 Spring Juvenile Hurdle at Leopardstown’s Dublin Racing Festival.

Way Back Home added further solidity to the form of that race next time in winning his maiden hurdle at Fairyhouse, and Saturday’s win was another step forward.

He is not entered in the Triumph Hurdle or the Fred Winter Hurdle, but that may not be a bad thing. He was racing for the second time in 10 days on Saturday, and his trainer said after Saturday’s race that a little break might be a good thing for him now. Skip Cheltenham. Maybe have a look at Punchestown. He and his trainer are both on the up.

Arkle weakened

IT’S a real shame that Le Richebourg has been ruled out of the Arkle. The Arkle is usually one of the most exciting races at the Cheltenham Festival, and Le Richebourg was one of the most exciting horses in it.That leaves the race a lot less exciting that it might have been.

Dynamite Dollars is out, Cilaos Emery is out, and it looks like Defi Du Seuil is going to stay on the JLT path. Those four horses would probably be occupying the top four places in the market, or at least four of the top five, if they were still in contention. There will still be an Arkle winner, of course, and the absentees will be an absolute irrelevance to the winning connections. That has a probability of 1.0.