Snow Leopardess, the grey working mum who keeps bucking convention, has trainer Charlie Longsdon fawning over her latest video ahead of her return to Aintree’s Grand National course.
The ten-year-old mare, one of the leading fancies for last season’s Grand National, returns to the scene of her greatest triumph when she tackles the Boylesports Becher Handicap Chase on Saturday. It will be her second appearance of the campaign since she returned to training from a summer break in Kent where she was filmed being joined by a young deer while out for a walk.
“I didn’t know about the video until I saw it,” said Longsdon. “That was filmed back home in Kent where she does a lot of her pre-training and schooling with the owner at Knowlton Court near Canterbury. It’s a fantastic little video. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”
Snow Leopardess is the fifth line of a generation reared by Marietta Fox-Pitt, the octogenarian matriarch of the celebrated equestrian family and mother-in-law of ITV Racing presenter Alice Plunkett.
Unusual in that she was brought back into training after giving birth to filly named Red Panda in 2019, Snow Leopardess won three in a row last term before she was pulled up in the Grand National at jumping 16 fences.
She only got one fence into her comeback at Warwick, a race Lonsgdon dismissed as a “non-event.”
“She slid about 20 yards all the way into the first fence last time and quite rightly the jockey pulled her up,” he said. “It was a non-event.
“She is going into the race on Saturday in as good form as last year. She schooled in Lambourn last week, she worked in Lambourn, she seems in very good form. Like all these things it is now about getting luck in running.
“It will probably be a mixture of good to soft and soft at Aintree, which should be fine. I wouldn’t want it to dry up much more than that.”
Longsdon said the ground was to blame at Aintree in April where the mare went off a 10-1 chance.
“There was a lot of hype and a lot of expectation but we knew in the week leading up to it that the ground was going against her. It was dry, dry, dry. If we got the same situation again next time she wouldn’t be going.
“In an ideal world we want a soft ground National, but whether we will get one in April is a different matter. She will definitely be there if it did come up soft but if they are watering the course, I’d say we’d be bypassing it.”
Red Panda, now aged three, will also go into training with Longsdon and has already worked upsides her mother.
“She probably won’t be racing until the autumn next year," he added. "She is still very much a baby and is on her holidays in Kent now. I hope she has some of her mother’s ability and toughness. Toughness has got to be her mother’s main ability.
“It is unusual for mother and daughter to exercise together but it’s very rare that a mother comes back into training. There are plenty of unusual things about this mare. Stories follow her around.”
