The trouble with being the best around is that second-best will never do. Kauto Star won the Betfair Chase at Haydock Park on Saturday and he was expected to do that.

Kauto Star had Madison Du Berlais 24 lengths behind in third place. He was expected to do that as well, the only problem was that Kauto Star had only a nose to spare over Imperial Commander and that was not expected. So, is this the first signs of a champion in decline or a new king simply waiting for the moment of coronation? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

Kauto Star’s trainer, Paul Nicholls, looked like a man reprieved from the gallows when the verdict was announced that the photo-finish had gone in his favour. The absence of a publically available print of the photo-finish gave the conspiracy theorists something to chew on but it was the form implications that had Phil Smith more interested.

The British Horseracing Authority’s head of handicapping concluded that Kauto Star had run something like 12lbs below last season’s Cheltenham Gold Cup winning performance of 186, leaving Imperial Commander still short of what is required. However, as Imperial Commander is now rated at 179 it puts him the equal of anything achieved last season by Denman, Kauto Star’s stable companion and the Gold Cup winner of 2008, and up with the likes of Best Mate in terms of the best staying chaser of recent years.

All roads now lead to the William Hill King George VI Chase at Kempton Park on Boxing Day where, last year, Kauto Star trounced Imperial Commander by over 70 lengths. It is a course which definitely favours Kauto Star but when Imperial Commander ran, the Nigel Twiston-Davies yard was in the sort of slump that even Alastair Darling would be pushed to find a positive spin to.

Twiston-Davies managed just two winners through a two-month period either side of that run, which suggests that Imperial Commander is better than that, although a preference for left-handed tracks makes the totesport Cheltenham Gold Cup in March, a track where he has five wins from just nine runs, a better prospect for success.

If nothing else there is the prospect of a genuine challenge to Kauto Star’s supremacy coming from somewhere other than Denman, his next-door neighbour at the Nicholls yard, who will have the opportunity to lay down his own marker in the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury on Saturday.

One of the aspects of Denman’s career has been his ebullient part-owner, Harry Findlay, but it appears that the BHA is looking to tighten up its regulations regarding the ability of other owners to pass a “fit and proper persons” criteria.

The obvious use of this background check would be to keep out those who might corrupt the sport but there could be others caught in this particular regulatory net. Thaksin Shinawatra’s time as owner of Manchester City gave the FA Premier League something of a headache and one of the more colourful owners in British racing is Ramzan Kadyrov.

The president of Chechnya has what might be politely termed as something of an image problem given that he was once described as “a Stalin of our times” by Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot and killed shortly afterwards.
When one of Kadyrov’s horses, Mourilyan, finished third in the Melbourne Cup three weeks ago, the leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, called for the Australian government to withhold the prize money until it could be proved that the money would not be used to fund Kadyrov’s dictatorship.

Clearly Kadyrov must have some good points, if only that he pays his training bills on time. Mourilyan had been trained in this country by Gary Moore and, when the horse won at Goodwood in August, Moore claimed that he had never had any problems and not even spoken to his most high-profile owner, only dealing with his agent.

Probably a good idea to stay out of the picture on that one.

Paul Wheeler