CHAMPION HURDLE/THE MAIN CONTENDER:The Waterford trainer is wary of speculating on just how good his classy hurdler may be
IF DREAMS which come true can be unsettling, then Henry De Bromhead's face for the next few days will be a picture of uneasy anticipation. Rarely, if ever, has a young trainer gone into the Cheltenham festival with such a gut-tumbling mix of hope and wariness swimming inside. But few have faced into a Champion Hurdle with a horse to dream of like Sizing Europe.
In the weeks since the dark-bay six-year-old propelled himself into the spotlight as Irish racing's great white hope, anyone who has felt a faint shiver of appreciation at a galloping thoroughbred will have contemplated Sizing Europe and wondered just what kind of talent we might be dealing with here.
Conor O'Dwyer still insists he has never travelled faster down the Leopardstown back straight on Hardy Eustace than he did in January's AIG. But Sizing Europe swept past as if the former double-champion were some sort of arthritic plater. Hardy Eustace might be just past his peak, but the new boy on the block made him look like a tired Floyd Patterson being swatted aside in the slipstream of a lot of Ali swagger.
Not even Istabraq went into his first Champion Hurdle with as much potential as Sizing Europe will on Tuesday; nor did Dawn Run. Golden Cygnet was brilliant but never made the Champion.
That makes up just about the crème de la crème of Irish hurdlers in the last 50 years, and, in terms of what he might turn out to be, Sizing Europe is right up there.
The festival's opening day feature is still being billed as competitive, but there's a horse in it that might yet turn it into a coronation. He really could be that good.
That worry threatens to come between De Bromhead and sleep for a few nights.
As a bright, self-assured customer, but also a self-confessed "born and bred worrier", De Bromhead will no doubt appreciate the yin and yang vibe to being the most important person in the Sizing Europe story. As in any position of responsibility, it's great to do the steering when it all works. The sleeplessness comes from knowing the driver is the go-to guy in the blame game if it all crashes.
The good news is that while those of us with only a financial or sentimental attachment to the idea of what Sizing Europe might become are guilty of getting in front of ourselves, the 35-year-old at the wheel is displaying a quiet assurance that in the circumstances is damn impressive. And it won't be just money or sentiment that will make a lot of people very happy for De Bromhead if Sizing Europe does bound up that famous hill clear of the rest.
There's an understated charm to the man who trains his superstar just five miles from the centre of Waterford city that makes it easy to warm to him. That charm also jostles with an apparent horror at the idea that anyone might think him anything but unassuming.
An admittedly lame attempt to peel away the self-deprecating uniform by asking him to describe himself is met with: "Christ, that's much too cerebral for me . . . I don't know . . . very good looking . . . fairly shy . . . even more good looking . . . quietly ambitious I suppose."
The danger with taking the self-deprecating route sometimes is that the witless can take it seriously. De Bromhead might couch his ambition in an easy manner but that doesn't mean it isn't there. He just likes to do things his way.
That's hardly surprising. Anyone reading his pedigree would presume nothing else.
Harry De Bromhead was a businessman who decided to make training a full-time job and pursued it with a single-minded determination to do it his way. That included seeing a gap in the market by buying cheap fillies out of top English flat stables, sweetening them up on the land outside Waterford and then running them in bumpers. By the time that bumper route was closed off by the authorities, the De Bromhead stables were up and running: so much so that in 1993, Fissure Seal recorded a memorable Cheltenham victory in the Pertemps Hurdle.
"An original thinker, a bit unorthodox, maybe some would say a little wacky sometimes, but he did things differently," is the son's rather more definite summation of the father. "And I've ended up using an awful lot of his ideas."
Other ideas were picked up from a year spent in Robert Alner's yard and two in Newmarket with Mark Prescott. As well as some time working in studs, mainly Coolmore, it all contributed to De Bromhead officially taking over the training licence on the first day of the new millennium. The only meeting that day in Britain or Ireland was at nearby Tramore and his first not particularly fancied runner won. The second started odds on and got stuffed.
"I got the ups and downs in one day alright," De Bromhead grins ruefully. "There was a vague idea at the back of my mind that I would train, but it wasn't planned by any means. And it all started off pretty well. We got amazing publicity from that first winner because there was nothing else on. There were eight winners the first season, and the same the following season. Then things started to go downhill."
One season yielded a meagre three victories and the born-and-bred worrier really had something to ponder: was it worthwhile keeping going? "I was definitely thinking of packing it in at one stage. On a bad day, it really felt like it wasn't worth it. I was still selling pointers, but I was buying cheap little five-granders and, while I got lucky with a horse like Surprising, there's a reason why those horses cost what they did."
Salvation came from an unlikely source. Alan Potts is the kind of owner beleaguered young trainers dream about at night and then wake up feeling slightly shamefaced. Possessed of serious money from having invented a machine that can size rock when it is being mined, the Englishman rang up to inquire if there were any horses for sale. In a business where finding the horse is the easy part, it was like a call from nirvana.
Potts took to the young trainer and soon owned a third of the horses in De Bromhead's 37-box stables. He appreciated the younger man's company and his straightness when it came to business. In return, he provided the funds to pitch at the big time and €42,500 secured both of them a golden ticket.
An expedition to John Bleahen's nursery near Ballinasloe revealed a strapping three-year-old by Pistolet Bleu that was a half-brother to a De Bromhead stalwart called The Spoonplayer.
"It would be nice to say 'he looked me in the eye and I knew', but unfortunately that wasn't the case," grins the trainer. "I liked him as much as some of the others we bought and no more. We concluded the deal for him over the phone to his owner, John's brother, Hugh. We woke him up to do it, and he still says that's the only reason we got him so cheap!"
Sizing Europe's talent emerged in more of a slow burn than a firecracker, but there were encouraging signs. Tommy Treacy rode him in a piece of work on the Doninga gallops and said he felt just a little different. Then he scooted clear of some smart horses in a schooling hurdle at Tipperary, having started last. A good bumper career turned into an even better novice hurdle season where he mixed it with the likes of Catch Me and De Valira, while giving the impression that time might make the other's nostalgic for their competitiveness with him.
What he had done on the book earned him an official rating of 128, a mark that excited De Bromhead in terms of a possible handicap score but also made him wonder if he had been over-rating Sizing Europe. But it did allow a valuable and not unexpected win in the Greatwood Hurdle at Cheltenham in November which kicked off day-dreams of the ultimate prize. They, in turn, became a lot more concrete after that scintillating AIG success.
"We went up there hoping to finish in the first three and go to Cheltenham as a 12 or 14 to one shot," De Bromhead recalls. "It was kind of scary what he did. I can't imagine he can improve a lot for that. There's certainly not another 10 kilos to come off him. Maybe that was him and I've got it wrong. I don't know."
Only someone with a chronic lack of imagination could not wonder about such a scenario. The tantalising idea remains that Sizing Europe's talent is not fully explored.
