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The Dan Skelton-trained chaser is hoping to follow in the hoofprints of great greys at Kempton on Boxing Day
A bold-jumping grey in the King George at Kempton: for a dozen years from the mid‑1980s, it was a Boxing Day tradition as Desert Orchid, One Man and Teeton Mill racked up seven wins from nine appearances between them. And as Robert Kirkland, a racehorse owner for nearly 40 years, still recalls, there might have been another.
“The first horse I ever had a share in was called High Edge Grey,” Kirkland said this week. “He won the Charlie Hall at Wetherby in 1988 and the plan was to go to Kempton, but then he hurt his back in the Hennessy at Newbury. In those days, you didn’t have chiropractors for horses, and he missed it.”
Kirkland has been hoping to find another horse good enough to run in a King George ever since, and will finally get his wish when Grey Dawning, one of the favourites, brings memories of Desert Orchid and his fellow greys flooding back as he goes to post for the feature event at Kempton on Thursday.
The seven-year-old is a throwback to a different age in steeplechasing in more ways than one.
While jumping’s biggest owners can now have a hundred or more racing in their colours, Kirkland still operates on a relatively small scale, with no more than “eight or nine” in training at any one time.
Unlike an increasing number of British-based owners, meanwhile, he has also resisted the temptation to send horses to be trained in Ireland. “You see the fields in Ireland, they’re much bigger than we have in England and that’s the way it’s been going, I’m afraid,” he says. “I was approached a few years ago about owning horses to run in Ireland but I could never imagine myself going over on a regular basis to see horses racing, so the answer was no.”
The fact that Grey Dawning is running at Kempton at all, meanwhile, is a testament to his remarkable powers of recovery after a hard-fought second-place finish in last month’s Betfair Chase.
King George horses of days gone by, from the mighty Arkle in the 1960s to Desert Orchid in the 1980s, would often race once a month during the winter campaign and prepare for Kempton by carrying top weight in a valuable handicap a few weeks earlier.
The modern way, though, is a lighter campaign ahead of the spring festivals at Cheltenham and Aintree, and while Dan Skelton, Grey Dawning’s trainer, is more inclined than many of his fellow trainers to get his horses on to the track whenever possible, even he had mentally cleared his gelding’s schedule until late January at the earliest after his last race at Haydock. Grey Dawning, however, seems to be cut from an earlier cloth.
“The next morning was the first port of call and I was amazed going into the stable by how bright and well he was,” Skelton says.
“I was expecting to go in there and see him tired, that he’d left some food, maybe lying down, and for the week after the race that he’d be very lethargic and lying down a lot.
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“It was amazing. We had him as fit as we’ve ever had him first time up for that race, but the way he was acting afterwards was that he’d really stepped forward for it and it really took me by surprise. I’d already mentally scratched everything from my mind so I was prepared to not run in the King George and just wait until the horse said he was ready. If he hadn’t said that he was, we wouldn’t be here.”
Victory in the race on Thursday comes with a £150,000 first prize that would significantly boost Skelton’s challenge for a first National Hunt trainers’ championship, an achievement that seemed to be in the bag in February 2024 before Willie Mullins carried all before him in the final two months to become the first UK champion based in Ireland for 70 years.
The Skelton yard has been one of the few to offer any significant resistance to the big Irish stables in recent seasons, and a Grade One double on the third day at Cheltenham in March, initiated by Grey Dawning’s win in the Turners Novices’ Chase, was a notable first for his operation last season. A King George victory, though, would be a new high water mark in his 12 seasons with a licence.
To succeed, Grey Dawning will need to see off not just the Irish challenge but a strong contingent from France, including the mercurial Il Est Francais, a devastating winner of the King George card’s novice chase 12 months ago. French-trained King George winners were another regular feature of the 1980s and 1990s, including the shock success of François Doumen’s Nupsala in 1987 when Desert Orchid was the beaten favourite, but the prize has not crossed the Channel since Doumen recorded the last of his five victories with First Gold in 2000.
Grey Dawning goes into Thursday’s race a few pounds adrift of several opponents on official ratings, but – like Desert Orchid before his first King George success in 1987, as it happens – he is an improving seven‑year‑old with scope for sufficient progress to scale the pinnacles of steeplechasing.
“My earliest racing memory is watching Desert Orchid win the King George, in 1989 I think,” Skelton, who was four at the time, said this week. “I certainly wouldn’t be drawing comparisons to Desert Orchid ever probably, let alone at this stage of his life, but grey horses are great to watch and I’m sure he’ll be popular with the on-course public.” Twenty‑six years on from Teeton Mill in 1998, it might just be time for another grey Christmas.
Grey Dawning bids to follow in Desert Orchid tradition for King George glory
