WE have a feast of Saturdays through the month of November and, watching the top-class racing last Saturday, two performances remained in the mind later in the evening, for vastly different reasons.

Altior earned the superlatives at Sandown but, an hour earlier, another popular jumps horse, Don Poli, was disappearing out the back of the television at Aintree, pulled up in the Becher Chase. It reminded one just how short a time we have with these jumpers who thrill us more than any flat horse. It seems a short time since Don Poli was being talked up as a Gold Cup winner.

It emphasised again how we should treasure horses like Altior, now unbeaten since his bumper days.

Go back three years to the Cheltenham Festival of 2016 when Altior beat Min by seven lengths in the Supreme Novices’. A year earlier, Don Poli won the RSA Chase in impressive style, and joined the equally impressive JLT Novices’ winner Vautour on our post-Cheltenham cover of this paper. ‘The future of chasing’, we said. Vautour for the Champion? Don Poli for the Gold Cup? How quickly things change.

They both returned in 2017, Vautour imperious again in the Ryanair, Don Poli added the Lexus but was well beaten in the Gold Cup. Vautour is gone, Don Poli is nine but not the force of old, Altior is eight. We have a few years with him yet, let’s enjoy him at his own pace.

Grade 1 bonanza

IT’S Hurricane Fly I feel sorry for. The racing powers don’t want him to keep that record of 22 Grade 1 races. At the rate we are going, we’ll have a record number of Grade 1 jumps races in Ireland. We’ve had two more added in the last two months, with the two-mile chase at the Dublin Racing Festival upgraded to Grade 1 status after just one year, though it existed as the Tied Cottage Chase before. There’s €25,000 added to the prize fund but we had only seven runners last year, three for Willie against three from Henry, and Simply Ned came over for the weekend. Limerick’s Grade 1 will probably be won by one of our dominant owners and trainers. Is this good for racing?

It won’t be too difficult for a horse to notch up 10 Grade 1 wins if it stays injury-free, at the rate we are going. At least the pattern system on the Flat requires international consensus before adding new pattern races. The Group 1 Goodwood Cup was created to help the staying division.

In the USA recently some Grade 1 races were demoted. It seems a better way. You need to earn and continue to justify the status by field-size and calibre of winners.

Beautiful legacy

IT was a great shame that a horse as popular as the 2000 Guineas winner George Washington proved infertile and sired only one foal, the filly Date With Destiny.

But, in the world of racing and breeding, where £1 million could see you end up with just a Lingfield maiden winner, it’s amazing that the line lives on. The filly was a winner as a two-year-old and one of her foals, Beautiful Morning, won the Group 3 Royal Whip Stakes this year. Two weeks ago she was sold for 1,400,000gns at the Tattersalls December Sale. What would you call the offspring from such a rare line that must have had the odds stacked against it? I have the very name – Mullinalachta!