Adonis mystery means there'll be 'what ifs' should Lulamba and Palladium come up short at Cheltenham

I can’t have been the only person scratching their head when Nicky Henderson elected to give his two star juveniles Lulamba and Palladium a racecourse gallop last week rather than run them in the Adonis Hurdle at Kempton.

An explanation was given by stable jockey Nico de Boinville, who said the Adonis, run on February 22, was staged too close to the Triumph Hurdle on March 14 to be having a “dust-up” on soft ground, as he put it.

Yet Henderson is a master when it comes to the Triumph, a race he has won more often than any other trainer with seven victories, and he has proved more than once that the Adonis is in fact an ideally scheduled prep race, with Katarino in 1999 and Soldatino in 2010 both scoring at Kempton before they followed up at the festival.