AFTER weeks of lovely weather, it seemed unfair that we were faced with Storm Callum for our important Jump Season Opener weekend!

However, although the weather limited our crowd somewhat, it provided an excellent racing surface and the action on the track was absolutely fantastic.

When I first started working in racing I would have dreamed of staging a race meeting of this quality, with the top trainers like Paul Nicholls, Nicky Henderson and Colin Tizzard bringing some of their best horses. The feedback from the racing community afterwards has been great too, thanks to the hard work of our new clerk of the course Libby O’Flaherty and her groundstaff team.

Three years ago the opening 2m novice hurdle at this meeting was won by Nicky Henderson’s Altior which went on to be the highest rated horse in the country.

Whether his winner this year, Pym, will be quite that good is questionable, but he looks a very exciting prospect nonetheless. The second, Deyrann De Carjac, for Alan King, was carrying a seven pound penalty and is also an exciting horse to follow. The second heat of this race went to the Nigel Twiston-Davies trained Rocco.

It was a very good weekend for trainer Paul Nicholls and jockey Harry Cobden. Their first win of the weekend came with the impressive Posh Trish in the mares novices’ hurdle. They then took the 4 year old hurdle with Grand Sancy.

However, it was an ex-Nicholls trainer runner who took the richest race of the meeting, the Chepstow Contract Rentals Silver Trophy. Garo De Juilley was sold out of the Nicholls yard for just £8000 in May, so it was a nice return for the new owners to win the £28,000 first prize, especially if they backed him at 25/1! It was the biggest winner of Gloucestershire trainer Sophie Leech’s career.

The Smerdon Tree Services Novices Chase for the Robert Mottram Memorial Trophy is a race with a great history of top class winners. The outsider of the four Spiritofthegames took a dramatic race with the fancied Master Tommytucker falling when in contention. The winning trainer was this season’s current leading trainer Dan Skelton.

We saw some great old favourites come back to their best for the 3m handicap chase, Neil Mulholland’s The Young Master came out on top of the Gary Moore trained Traffic Fluide. We needed a Welsh-trained winner on the card and Evan Williams, so successful at this meeting in the past, took the last race, a mares handicap chase, with Still Believing.

On Sunday Paul Nicholls continued his good form with two more winners, although his favourite Quel Destin in the opening 3 year old hurdle was beaten fairly easily by the Lizzie Kelly ridden Montestrel.

Our ambassador Richard Johnson rode the mare Drinks Interval to take the 3m novice chase and she jumped spectacularly from pillar to post to win unchallenged for trainer Colin Tizzard.

The feature race of the day was the Fox Family Persian War Novices Hurdle, which went, for the fifth time in 11 years, to Paul Nicholls with Secret Investor. The winner was ridden by Harry Cobden, who was again successful in the following race, this time for Colin Tizzard, on King’s Lad. In the £40,000 John Ayres Memorial Chase the classy but injury prone Baron Alco went off joint favourite despite 577 days off the track. He looked like making a winning return but was collared late on by Charbel for Kim Bailey.

The last race was a bumper, a flat race for young jumping bred horses. McFabulous put in a powerful finish to score for Paul Nicholls and Harry Cobden again, making the pair our most successful trainer and jockey of the meeting, with 4 and 5 winners respectively.

We’ve seen some really exciting performances over the weekend and it will be interesting to see how all of these horses fare over the coming season.

Our next meeting on Tuesday, 30th October features a novice chase won two years ago by top chaser Thistlecrack.