Champion jumps trainer Willie Mullins will take the first step towards providing His Majesty The King and Her Majesty The Queen with a Royal Ascot winner from their first ever horse they have placed in training in Ireland when Reaching High lines out in a lady riders' handicap at Leopardstown on Friday under Jody Townend.
Reaching High has a number of potential targets at the royal meeting, including the Copper Horse Handicap, in which last year's emphatic Leopardstown winner A Piece Of Heaven went on to run a respectable seventh. The winner of that race was none other than Belloccio, trained by Mullins, who has an exemplary record in the staying handicaps at Royal Ascot in recent years.
And Reaching High is bred for that job. Out of Gold Cup winner Estimate and by Sea The Stars, the four-year-old reached a rating of 92 for Sir Michael Stoute before the legendary handler called time on his career last year. He is relatively unexposed, too, given he has raced only eight times, winning one of those starts and placing a further three times.
Mullins commented on the acquisition, “I'm delighted to have been sent a horse with the kind of pedigree and profile that Reaching High has. He could make up into a nice dual-purpose type and we would have liked to have given him his first start over hurdles by now but he's just had one or two little issues, which is why he will be starting out on the Flat for us at Leopardstown on Friday. He's had a little wind procedure and this run will tell us what direction we go with him.”
Meanwhile, John Warren, the bloodstock advisor to the King and Queen, suggested that the reason Reaching High was sent to Mullins upon Stoute's retirement was because connections had one eye on a jumps campaign with the gelding. However, a tilt at the royal meeting was also mentioned by Warren when speaking to Nick Luck's Daily Podcast on Wednesday morning.
He said, “It's going to be a bit of fun. The King and Queen are looking forward to having a horse run in Ireland for the first time and this horse just might be a nice prospect who could develop into a National Hunt horse. He's out of Estimate who, as you know, is a Gold Cup winner so stamina might be his game.
“He was trained very well by Sir Michael Stoute last year and when he packed up we thought it would be worthwhile looking at who could do a dual-purpose job with him. The Queen met with William on a number of occasions at Cheltenham and thought he was charming and wonderful and [he] keeps having more and more winners the whole time so the King and Queen were keen to send him [Reaching High] to be trained in Ireland.”
Warren added, “What we're hoping to find out now is whether he can be a dual-purpose horse and see how he progresses in his first couple of starts and whether he's an Ascot handicap horse.”
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