Victorious Forever will dip their toes into National Hunt racing for the first time in the Ryanair Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival having purchased Carrigmoornaspruce.
Shaikh Nasser bin Hamed Al Khalifa’s Victorious Racing merged with his brother Shaikh Khalid’s KHK Racing last year to form Victorious Forever and have bought the mare from Old Fools Partnership as Shaikh Nasser was keen to get into the National Hunt market.
Trained by Declan Queally, the six-year-old won a Punchestown Festival bumper last May and has never been out of the first two this season, winning at Listowel before stepping up to graded company and narrowly being beaten into second at Down Royal before another runner-up finish, this time at the top level in the Paddy Power Future Champions Novice Hurdle at Leopardstown.
Bloodstock agent Billy Jackson-Stops, who is racing manager for Victorious Forever, said: “If you were going to go jumping, Cheltenham is the place to do it!
“It’s something that Shaikh Nasser has always wanted to do. He enjoys watching racing and so this time of year watches a lot of jumps racing.
“And he’s an endurance athlete himself. He was the champion ironman (athlete), he’s now a champion endurance rider. He relates very closely to National Hunt racing, just because of the endurance factor.
“We were looking around for a while and came across her and we’ve got a little team of people including some data people that kind of help on all of our decision making and the final decision comes down to Shaikh Nasser. Everyone agreed and Shaikh Nasser was obviously very excited about her and that was that.
“It probably is one day at a time (with National Hunt investment). Our main focus is Flat racing between his highness Shaikh Nasser and Shaikh Khalid’s Victorious Forever team and they’ve had an incredible amount of success with multiple Group Ones last year. I think we’re just taking this one by one. It will be starting for fun, but I think like anything if you have a bit of success it could go anywhere.
“Hopefully she goes there with a chance. As you can imagine it wasn’t that easy to find a horse with a big chance that was available to buy and we thought she was the perfect candidate for that reason. She’s got a lot of upside, she’s young, she’s got residual value and most importantly she has a chance.
“She’s been in great form. We’ve got James Bowen, who is in cracking form, booked to ride her. He had his double on Saturday and is a super young rider on the way up.
“We’ve got a few years to really enjoy her, which is important.”
