Events / Jack Houghton / 31 October 2008 /

Jack Houghton celebrates the wonderful efforts of the brilliant chaser who cost Betfair a million ahead of his Down Royal reappearance on Saturday.

Picture the scene. Betfair had just sponsored a new race at Haydock - a Grade One Chase in November - and a gathered throng of racing enthusiasts at Hammersmith HQ were discussing the best way to leverage the sponsorship. "Leveraging" is something marketeers talk about. It means "get the best out of." In other words, someone thought it would be cool to sponsor this new race and the rest of us were trying to come up with a way to justify the decision to management.

Ideas were tabled. None of them original. A ladies day? Groan. A charity race beforehand? Groan. Some kind of bonus for winning the race? Even bigger groan. Then one of the lawyers uttered the word "million."

The rest of us assumed he was just reiterating his fee for being there; then a realisation occurred: offer a million pound bonus for any horse winning the Betfair Chase, the King George and the Gold Cup. Brilliant.

On the one hand it was achievable. Kicking King had been an impressive winner of the last two legs of the bonus the season before and many would think him likely to take all three that coming season.

On the other hand it was sufficiently difficult to quieten the Penfold look-alike finance chap. Someone told him it was at least a 10-1 shot. I pretended I was deep in concentration, started scribbling some random figures on notepaper, then announced: "No, I've worked it out - it's a 16-1 chance." And that was it. The Betfair Million was born.

Barry Geraghty gave Kicking King a terrible ride in the Betfair Chase. He'd got into a habit of letting the horse ping fences at pace - taking a few lengths out of his rivals - before reeling him back in. He'd done it at Punchestown in Kicking King's warm-up as well, when War Of Attrition beat him. If your horse is a better jumper than anything else, why continually surrender the advantage? So we were left with Kingscliff as the only contender for the Million, and hopes of ever paying it out were fast disappearing.

The following year we sat and met again. We would re-offer the bonus, but we all knew it would be a damp squib. We went through every conceivable contender, but none of them looked capable of winning an average Gold Cup - let alone all three races. There was no need this time to artificially inflate the chance of it happening to soothe the restless Penfold. Even he knew it wouldn't be won.

Then along came Kauto Star. A two-miler who had barely entered discussions a few weeks earlier, he raced over 2m4f for the first time since leaving France and gave nine pounds and a 21 length beating to Armaturk. Hang on, a literal interpretation of that form could give him an official rating of somewhere in the mid-180s. Now obviously that wasn't the case, but here at least we had a genuine contender again. Who's going to tell Penfold?

Sat in the bar at Sittingbourne Dog Stadium, I've loved Kauto Star ever since watching that Aintree race. And so - like thousands of others no doubt - I'll be nervously watching his comeback at Down Royal on Saturday. And although I'll want him to win, my punting head tells me that [1.57] is a layer's price, not a backer's.

During the Best Mate years, we became accustomed to top-class chasers appearing infrequently. Any other approach, we learnt, was incompatible with long-term success. And yet, Kauto Star has already run five more races than Best Mate managed in his entire career. Were there signs last year - defeat to Monet's Garden first time up, an injury scare, a slightly below-par performance in the Gold Cup and defeat to Old Vic at Aintree - that the end is near for Kauto? Anyone planning to back him on Saturday should remember that his last run was anything up to 20lbs below his best. How often would you take odds-on about a horse who had so badly tanked on his last appearance?

That was the end of a long season though. He's rested since then and connections report him bouncing. And I should be clear, this is not a recommendation to lay Kauto Star on Saturday. The point is: he's not to be backed. Anyone taking the [1.57] is betting on variables largely unquantifiable. It's a race to be watched, in the hope that the first Betfair Million winner has more to come.

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