Grey Dawning bids to follow in Desert Orchid tradition for King George glory
Share:
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.
![[Greg Wood]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Greg_Wood,_L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“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.”.
![[Dan Skelton’s most exiting horses L'Eau Du Sud , left, and Grey Dawning are housed next to each other at Lodge Stables in Warwickshire.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/396816f66e1388e175d6af3845b29fc9760f5081/0_272_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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 “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.”.
