Grey Dawning backed to go down Ryanair Chase route at 2025 Cheltenham Festival

By Matt Brocklebank

Horse Racing

Sun January 12, 2025 · 6h ago

Matt Brocklebank is backing Dan Skelton to train Grey Dawning for the Ryanair Chase at Cheltenham.

Holding a strong view that a certain horse has been campaigned towards precisely the sort of race you were hoping can obviously be incredibly helpful as a punter.

Being concerned that a bad decision has been made somewhere along the line, or might be made in future, is arguably even more powerful still, and I'm pretty convinced now that Grey Dawning is not a Cheltenham Gold Cup horse.

So a brief plea this Sunday to Dan Skelton, who vowed to "get the spring right” with his stable star in a recent interview with Scott Burton of the Racing Post.

He should be trained with one race in mind: the Ryanair Chase.

I'm certain Skelton will come to the sensible conclusion in the end regardless of what’s suggested externally, but getting it unequivocally right in my view would be to go back down in distance.

The Gold Cup had to be the dream at the start of the season, of course it did, but fresh evidence from the Betfair Chase - and less so the King George at Kempton where a first-fence blunder immediately put the horse on the back foot - will surely result in a rethink.

Protektorat almost had to go for the Gold Cup again in 2023, having been third in it the previous year before winning the Betfair Chase on seasonal debut in November 2022, but it wasn’t until dropped back in trip for the Ryanair that he eventually found his Festival niche just last March.

Skelton seems unlikely to fall into the same sort of trap, if it can be called that, with eight-year-old Grey Dawning, whose only career win at three miles, don’t forget, remains the Hampton Novices’ at Warwick when completely outclassing what we now know to be no more than handicappers in Apple Away and Broadway Boy.

His subsequent defeat of Ginny’s Destiny and Djelo in the Turners at Cheltenham, coupled with how well he travelled and sauntered to the front on his Haydock comeback, are the two key pieces of form here and it makes next to no sense sticking to what looked like plan A in October and taking on Galopin Des Champs this spring.

Newbury’s Denman Chase next month looks like being Grey Dawning’s next target and don’t be fooled into thinking that race fractionally short of three miles will firm up plans to go for Gold as it’s often a relative test of speed and was won last year by Shishkin.

Skelton, incidentally had his first ever runner in the race that day – the subsequent Ryanair winner Protektorat.

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