Five hundred and six days without competition leaves its mark. For his first race since his victory in the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris 2023, Rosario Baron did not really have an obligation to achieve results for this return, on the hurdles, but reassuring behavior was expected. Mission accomplished. Daniela Mele’s rider behaved well and won… a little helped by luck, since he was five lengths behind Gallipoli when he fell at the penultimate hurdle. Would he have fallen behind James Reveley’s partner if the latter had remained in the race? Opinions were divided on the racecourse. Rosario Baron was starting to make up some ground, it’s true, but there was still more to do. “I would not have pushed my horse to its limits, recognizes Johnny Charron. The race had already been run at a high pace, I wanted to give it a chance and simply do a nice straight line. The result was incidental.” But, even without being strictly speaking threatened, Gallipoli would he have maintained his action until the end? On this point, James Reveley himself had no clear opinion: “I don’t know if I still had enough gas to make it to the end. I was good, but nothing more. When horses make mistakes like this, it’s because they’re tired. But, in steeplechase, he had already made mistakes on simple hurdles in the past. Often, the best jumpers tend to neglect themselves when the difficulty is moderate. We trust them too much. There, I arrived at this hedge telling myself that he was going to manage. But, actually, no.”
Johnny Charron: “We put it together as usual”
For his reunion with Rosario Baron, Johnny Charron did not seek to innovate: “I rode him in training three weeks ago and he was already well toned. Today we rode it as usual. He is a small horse who is very quick in his legs, so it is never difficult to quickly put him among the leading horses. I knew that Gallipoli would go ahead. I also know that, like mine, he is a good jumper. So I took his wake and his aspiration and it helped me to finish.”
