First £1m jumps horse Palladium gets rave review on ‘opening night’
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When Palladium was knocked down for €1.4m (£1.2m) at a sales ring in France last October, the underbidder was a major Australian owner with long-term dreams of the Melbourne Cup. One more bid might have seen the 2024 German Derby winner on a plane down under, to spend Christmas and the new year in the agreeable warmth of the Australian summer ahead of the spring carnival at Flemington in November.
![[Nicky Henderson (right) with an eye on Palladium.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/577f34dfc77428e10b06022d797fd305716a1840/0_0_5576_3824/master/5576.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Instead, there was a shake of the head, and so it was that on a wet, chilly January afternoon in Cambridgeshire, Palladium cantered to the start on Thursday in the maroon colours of Lady Bamford, ready to become the most expensive horse ever sent over jumps.
Six-figure buys from the point-to-pointing field have become common currency at the Cheltenham festival in recent years as the four-day meeting has grown to dominate the winter game, but they have at least proved that they can jump an obstacle at speed. A seven-figure Classic winner who remains an “entire” – meaning that Palladium has not been gelded – and has never left the ground in public is rather different, and there was significant egg-on-face potential as the £1.2m horse set off for a maiden hurdle worth £4,221 to the winner.
Four minutes and eight increasingly proficient jumps later, Palladium was off the mark over timber, having eased into the lead after the third-last hurdle. The backers who sent him off at 8-15 had a slight moment of concern as Wolf Moon, a 50-1 outsider, made some headway between the final two flights, but Nico de Boinville, on Palladium, was always holding him off after a fluent jump at the last.
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