Royale Pagaille wins Betfair Chase to lay down Gold Cup marker

  • Cheltenham regular wins first Grade One at Haydock
  • Pic D’Orhy wins 1965 Chase after Shishkin’s refusal

If a six-and-a-half-length success in the first Grade One of the campaign – his first at the highest level – is as good as it gets for Royale Pagaille this season, the delight of his trainer and rider in the winner’s enclosure here on Saturday made it plain that it will be more than enough.

Venetia Williams’s nine-year-old has been beaten in the last three runnings of the Cheltenham Gold Cup, and remains an outsider at around 25-1 to make it fourth time lucky. But he is the epitome of the big, old-fashioned staying chaser that has always been Williams’s stock in trade, and if the mud happens to be flying at the Festival next March, who knows?

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/noVtWRb

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