Bargain-buy Hewick attempts to add Kerry National to big-race haul

Wednesday’s Guinness Kerry National at Listowel pales financially compared to this weekend’s new big-money pots at the Curragh although tradition guarantees it being the focus of racing attention.

The Harvest Festival’s €200,000 feature will see the gallant topweight Hewick try to continue his giant-killing exploits against 17 opponents.

Shark Hanlon’s bargain-buy €850 purchase once again upset the odds in the Galway Plate during the summer and is targeting a double completed by Life Of A Lord almost three decades ago.

In cash terms the reward for winning the historic handicap will be considerable but still well short of those riches up for grabs at flat racing HQ’s own autumn festival this weekend.

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For the first time since 2009 the Goffs Million is back on Saturday with 24 hopefuls left in Europe’s richest two-year-old prize at Tuesday’s acceptance stage.

Ahead of next week’s Goffs Orby Sale it is a race restricted to graduates of last year’s select auction in Kill, with prize money down to the 10th home.

Ordinarily Aidan O’Brien’s Hiawatha, a brother to no less than Luxembourg, might be expected to follow in his famous relative’s footsteps and tackle the Group Two Alan Smurfit Beresford Stakes on the same card.

But a €500,000 cheque to the winner is not to be sniffed at by even the game’s elite operations.

The Million concept has its own history, but an entirely new concept is the hugely boosted Friends of the Curragh Irish Cesarewitch.

Run for just €80,000 a year ago, on the initiative of the former Horse Racing Ireland chairman Joe Keeling it is now a bumper €600,000 contest run for horses with a maximum official rating of 110.

It trumps by €100,000 the money for last weekend’s Irish Leger won by Kyprios. Keeling has also predicted the handicap could be worth up to €1 million in all within a few years.

Not surprisingly the connections of a 77 horses felt it worthwhile to stay in the mix at the latest acceptance stage.

Hewick’s stable companion Hallowed Star is one of them, although it is Willie Mullins who looks set to tackle the prize in earnest with a dozen hopefuls still left in.

Echoes In Rain, winner of the big amateur contest at Galway during the summer, was immediately rated the best of the Mullins team by some bookmakers.

However, it is the Ballydoyle three-year-old Waterville, who began the season touted as a potential Derby winner, who was made a clear 4-1 favourite to carry off the €330,000 first prize for Coolmore.

Before all that, jump racing’s big guns are contending their own big pot in Listowel.

The theoretically more egalitarian appeal of handicaps isn’t backed up much by recent Kerry National results.

So, off a career high rating of 163 the pony-sized Hewick has quite a task, conceding 10lbs and more to his rivals.

They include half a dozen hopefuls from Joseph O’Brien, who supplied Assemble to win for Gigginstown last year.

Micheal O’Leary owns two of the O’Brien sextet this time and Fire Attack could be a betting proposition to remind the Ryanair boss’s rivals that he hasn’t gone away you know.

Last week’s confirmation of O’Leary re-establishing links with Willie Mullins after their famous 2016 split appears to make his subsequent announcement of a Gigginstown wind down something of a relative term.

Fire Attack came down five out in the Galway Plate just as Hewick, Darasso and El Barra, the first three in Ballybrit, were getting into their stride.

His prominent running style around this track, though, could make him a valid contender this time.