Racing - 'Pagan' has Festival in sights (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Racing - 'Pagan' has Festival in sights

10:27am Saturday 7th February 2009

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By: Richard Daniels RACEHORSE owner Richard Phizalacklea could be off to next month’s Cheltenham Festival after his improving mare Pagan Starprincess after she upset a Champion Hurdle contender at Doncaster.

Mr Phizacklea, of Over Kellett watched his four-year-old mare, who started at handsome odds of 28-1, beat the favourite Chomba Womba, ridden by A. P. McCoy, by a length and a quarter in the Grade 2 race on Town Moor.

It is another chapter in a fairy-tale story after Mr Phizacklea, a 65-year-old retired millwright and engineer, brought Pagan Starprincess’s dam Pagan Star as a hack to go riding as a hobby.

She had never raced on the turf, but had been a three-day eventer.

When he sent the horse’s passport to Wetherbys, who monitor horseracing in this country, to get her properly registered her real potential value came to light.

It came as “music to his ears”, he said, to learn that the back-breeding in her pedigree, with several Derby winning stallions in the family, suggested she might make a suitable broodmare for racehorses.

So he chose a sire after being impressed on looks with Robertico - a grandson of the Epsom Derby winner Roberto - who had won the German Derby.

The stallion went on to sire only 40 horses - Pagan Starprincess among them - before dying prematurely in Ireland.

Since then Pagan Starprincess, who is trained by George Moore in Middleham in Yorkshire, has turned out to be a bargain buy, winning a race on the flat, but proving to be a revelation when put over timber.

After winning a hurdle at Hexham 12 months ago she had gone on to finish second three times this season, including finishing runner-up in the Victor Ludorum Hurdle at Haydock, and her win in the Grade2 race suggest a tilt at Cheltenham may be in order.

It’s an exciting time for Mr Phizacklea, who for the broodmare to foal again in four or five weeks after being sent to Presidium - a brother to Henry Cecil’s outstanding miler Kris.

He also has a two-year-old half-brother called Presidum Galaxy, for whom there are high hopes after showing early promise on the gallops.

“It’s been a real thrill, particularly as I’ve bred Pagan Starprincess myself.. but it was only an accident that I got into horseracing after all,“ he confided.

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