Betfair Ascot Chase: Pic D'Orhy routs his rivals

Repeating his success of 2024 in the race, the last for trainer Paul Nicholls at Grade One level, he landed in front at the first and was to stay there.

L’Homme Presse made a bad early mistake and jumped to his left thereafter, pulling up passing the stands for the first time.

At that stage Corbetts Cross, sent off a well backed 7/4 favourite, was the nearest pursuer and was to remain that for the rest of the contest.

However the Irish raider couldn’t match the winner’s precision jumping and was fighting a losing battle coming out of the back straight.

Two more safe leaps sealed matters from there for Pic D’Orhy who went on to score by ten lengths.

“He’s a great horse, we’ve had so many great days and I really enjoyed that,” the winning rider told ITV Racing.

“This is massive, we’ve had a slow start but a lot of these horses are coming right now and I think we’ll have a good spring.

“When I looked at the big screen after the first circuit I thought I all have to do is stay on, keep one leg either side of the saddle and we’d be alright.”

A delighted Nicholls added: “We all have peaks and troughs and things just haven’t gone right since Christmas for various reasons and you've just got to keep believing in yourself and what you do and the horses.

“I knew he was right today, he looked great and he just put them to the sword. I’d say that was a career best and he’s ten.

“He loves it around here, it’s the sort of race that suits him. We always thought Cheltenham wouldn’t, we won’t go there, and try and get him right for Aintree again and in top form for that.”

Of his patchy form since the turn of the year the trainer added: “You want to do your best, we’ve had a tough time but everyone goes through these peaks and troughs. Some of the horses haven’t been right since we vaccinated them at Christmas but we’re on top of that now. You just have to be patient, believe in what you do, we just lack a few horses like this at the moment but it will come back."

Nicholls admits he faces an uphill battle in the title race that looks set to be won his former assistant Dan Skelton.

“I’ve been in an incredibly lucky position to win 14 championships and if Dan wins one this year I’ll be highly delighted for him.

“He was with us, I’m very proud of what he’s done and he’s a good mate. It’s hard to sustain the very top form forever and it's all about having the right horses and sadly at the moment we don’t have enough of the very good ones.

“Dan’s on a roll, he has a huge number of horses, and he’s doing well but I’m happy with what we’ve got and what we’ve done. The time when we won a lot of our championships is when we had all those good horses, it’s all about having a team with good players in it, and we’ve just got to build that back up again.

“I love everything that we do every day, I love the game, the challenge, its been challenging the last four or five weeks but days like this, horses like this, make it all worthwhile.”

An emotional owner Johnny de la Hey commented: “It meant an awful lot. It’s been a little tricky season for ourselves and Paul, to be fair, and a lot of people wrote this horse off.

“I was listening to a podcast last night and everyone said the horse was gone; we didn’t think that but we’ve been really patient with him, we were going to run him at Windsor but we thought the ground was too soft, and this was our Gold Cup – and we won our Gold Cup!”

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