One of the most eagerly anticipated races of recent seasons is set to take place at Ascot on Saturday, as unbeaten chasers Shishkin and Energumene go head-to-head in the Clarence House.
The pair were due to meet in last season’s Arkle at the Cheltenham Festival, but the Willie Mullins-trained Energumene was found to be lame a week out from the race, leaving Shishkin to score an emphatic success.
The assumption was that racing fans would have to wait until the Champion Chase at Cheltenham in March to see them finally collide, but with concerns over the likely state of the ground at next month’s Dublin Racing Festival, Mullins has decided to send his eight-year-old across the Irish Sea for his final pre-Cheltenham run.
Nicky Henderson, meanwhile, has long had the race earmarked for odds-on favourite Shishkin, who was controversially pulled out of the Tingle Creek earlier this season but impressed on his return at Kempton at Christmas.
“We’ve tried to organise a ferry strike all week but failed!” Henderson joked on Thursday. “I don’t suppose any of us expected we’d be stupid enough to take each other on this early in the season, but it’s the race we wanted to go for and Willie wants to come too. We come in with no excuses. It will be fascinating.”
The meeting of two superstars could hardly be more timely. British National Hunt racing, fresh from its Cheltenham and Grand National hammerings at the hands of the Irish last spring, has spent much of the season in a state of internal crisis, hindered by its bloated programme book and a lack of depth and quality that has seen its supposedly top-level races regularly return small fields and substandard renewals.
With Shishkin and Energumene representing half of the declared runners, the former remains an issue. Presuming both show their true running, the latter seems unlikely, too.
