AFTER he won the Champion Chase on his eighth start over fences I raised concerns about the likelihood of Sprinter Sacre continuing to win big races in this column.

My concerns were based on the fact that Sprinter Sacre’s trainer Nicky Henderson seems brilliant at getting horses to bloom early in their careers but that it’s rare for them to continue for long, especially if they’re steeplechasers.

As I noted at the time, you can point to Long Run as an exception but since 1996 only one of the other 15 Grade 1 chase winners that he’s trained has gone on winning in Grade 1 company beyond four more runs at the top level.

The exception was Tiutchev who achieved the feat for another trainer (Martin Pipe after a 10-month break).

Sure enough, although Sprinter Sacre did win two more Grade 1s, three runs after his Champion Chase win he had to be pulled up at Kempton and was found to have a heart murmur.

It was 13 months before he made his comeback last Saturday at Ascot in the Grade 1 Clarence House Chase.

Sprinter Sacre started odds-on at Ascot and looked sure to win for most of the race. He moved better than his rivals and jumped very nicely.

However, he failed to get away from his main rival Dodging Bullets. Instead he slipped back to second in the closing stages as that one was driven past him.

I concede that Sprinter Sacre appeared to be given an easy time of things by jockey Barry Geraghty. However, it now seems clear that Geraghty was nursing him home as there are two clear signs he finished really tired.

The first sign was pointed out to me by the racing editor of The Guardian, Tony Paley. He sent me a photograph of Sprinter Sacre at the finish of the race and noted that he seemed to be showing a lot of foam around the mouth.

I went through other photos of Sprinter Sacre and could find only one where he showed a similar amount of foam in his mouth. This was after he’d won the Tingle Creek following an eight-month break.

It seems to me that horses show more foam in their mouths when they’re breathing more heavily. My conclusion is that Sprinter Sacre is such a big, gross horse that it’s hard to get him fully fit off a long break, so he tends to finish tired first time back.

Then came the news that Sprinter Sacred had bled after the Clarence House Chase.

I accept that a lot of horses show some sort of bleeding after a race due to the stress placed on their lungs, and that in this case the bleeding was only slight.

However, the two things Henderson surely wanted to see least from Sprinter Sacre, other than a loss or a recurrence of the heart trouble, were any signs of bleeding or respiratory distress.

Maybe Sprinter Sacre can come back from this defeat due to being fitter and racing on less testing ground at Cheltenham. That’s not the way I’d be betting at the available odds.

The winner Dodging Bullets (42) clocked a seriously fast time and has done so a few times before. You could argue that he is now the one they all have to beat in the Champion Chase.

The trouble I have with this idea is that Dodging Bullets doesn’t seem to hold his form very well later in the season. He’s won nine of the last 11 times he’s run between late July and January, but he’s lost all 16 times he’s run after January up until mid-July.

Third placed Twinlight (39) went well for a long way but couldn’t quite go with the first two in the closing stages. He earned the same rating from me when winning the Paddy Power Dial-A-Bet Chase on his previous start, so I think this is as good as he is, though that is pretty darned good.

The key to Twinlight seems to be soft or heavy ground and a small field. The horse apparently disliked being asked to race on the inside of a 10-runner field when pulled up at Cork and was deliberately kept wide when beating a smaller field last time.

Before this smart run Twinlight’s had proven tough to beat in single figure fields over two miles or two mile one furlong on soft or heavy ground.

He’d won eight from 11 in these circumstances.