The first time that Barry Geraghty rode Constitution Hill in a quick piece of labor, he was once following in some very well-known hoofprints. “It was actually on Jim Dreaper’s grass gallop,” he stated this week, “where Arkle and Flyingbolt and all those horses would have galloped for years. There’s been one or two airplanes landing in that field.”
Constitution Hill was another. “I worked him over about a mile and six on the grass,” Geraghty remembers, “so you’re going at a nice even pace and then you quicken in the last half-mile.
“An average horse will quicken once and gallop away, the really nice one will quicken a second time, but this fella just kept quickening, kept quickening. Where you pull up, it goes into a plowed field, so you’d like to have them pulled up before that. This fellow was in the plowed field before we knew it.”
For Geraghty, who had bought Constitution Hill three years earlier as a six-month-old foal in conjunction with the point-to-point trainer, Warren Ewing, the gallop was final confirmation that they had a superstar on their hands. Subsequent events have only added to the excitement, while still leaving plenty of room to speculate over just how close Constitution Hill could get to the sport’s all-time greats.
The next chapter in the story will arrive on Monday, when Nicky Henderson’s hurdler goes to post against four rivals in the Grade One Christmas Hurdle at Kempton Park, and apart from one minor blip in his only point-to-point, Constitution Hill’s progress since that workout on the famous Dreaper gallop has been flawless.
After four wins, including three at Grade One level, he is already one of the highest-rated hurdlers in the Timeform operation’s long history. For Geraghty, who spent a quarter of a century as one of the sport’s finest National Hunt jockeys and has seen aboard champions like Moscow Flyer and Sprinter Sacre, a hands-on role in Constitution Hills’s early years brings immense additional satisfaction.
So too the fact that he cost just €16,500 at Tattersalls Ireland November Sale in 2017, a sale where the other five lots by his sire, Blue Bresil, were knocked down for significantly higher sums.
“He was a gorgeous foal,” he recalls. “His pedigree had a lot of positives in it and I’d ridden Le Prezien [another son of Blue Bresil] and liked him. And a first foal is often a small foal, but he was a good size.
“I’ve been buying horses over the years and sometimes you just come out and think, oh Jeez, we’ve robbed one there. I’m not just looking back now and saying that, we bought [subsequent Gold Cup winner Bobs Worth] as a yearling and we liked him but we definitely didn’t feel like we’d robbed them.
“But we definitely thought that was the day we bought this fella, and there’s more photos of him in my phone than any horse we ever had, just because we loved him at every stage as he progressed.”
As Constitution Hill grew and blossomed at his strong, Geraghty made no secret of his regard for his newest acquire, priming the marketplace for the day when he can be bought to enter coaching. “I was telling people with confidence that he was a bit special,” he says, and his point-to-point defeat made little distinction. “He looked the winner everywhere,” Geraghty says, “dived at the last, rallied all the way to the line and in two more strides, he’d have won.”
It did, then again, take the threshold off Constitution Hill’s bodily situation when he went to Goffs’ UK Sale at Doncaster in May 2021. “He must have tweaked something in that mistake,” Geraghty says, “because he had muscle wastage in his back , so maybe some people were reluctant to get involved. In the scheme of it, he was a bargain [at £120,000] but he just didn’t look well enough on the day.”
It meant, however, that Nicky Henderson, Geraghty’s former employer, was able to buy the then four-year-old for Michael Buckley, “who knew how excited I was about him”, and his former owner is confident that Constitution Hill could not be in better hands.
“He’s got to such a high level so quickly,” Geraghty says, “and numerous the credit score has to visit the person who is having a look after him.
“To smash the [two-mile] observe report at Cheltenham in your 3rd get started, that is somewhat bit frightening. [Former champion novice] The Golden Cygnet was once at all times the legendary horse when you like, and all of us grew up with “the next Golden Cygnet” each time a sensible horse got here alongside.
“No one had reached that degree and he is already handed it on timeform, in order that provides to the joy, and Nicky’s care and a spotlight will confidently result in years and years of racing forward.”