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Reve De Sivola: the Long Walk king with the heart of a lion

Reve De Sivola won the Long Walk Hurdle three times
Reve De Sivola won the Long Walk Hurdle three timesCredit: Jan Kruger

March 25, 2017 will always be a day seared into Nick Williams’ mind. It was the day the finest horse he’d ever trained, Reve De Sivola, fell foul of nature’s cruelest curse.

The enormous heart which had powered his memorable career, had kept him scything through bottomless ground and made him almost impossible to pass from the front, tragically beat for the last time.

Williams remembers the drive back to his Devon base from Kelso that day, a drive already horrific enough without the sobering realisation that the horse who had come to define his fine career would not be returning with them.

“It’s a terrible drive back to Devon from Kelso at the best of times but obviously that day it was made even worse by the tragic circumstances,” Williams says. “It was just a very sad day for everyone involved with the horse.”

By 2017 Reve De Sivola was no longer the horse he had once been. Winless for over a year and long in tooth at the age of 12, his star no longer shone as bright as it once had.

He was not the sprightly youngster who won two Grade 1s as a novice hurdler in the 2009-10 season, neither the hardy, dour stayer who was ever present on the staying hurdle scene for four seasons over which he won three Long Walk Hurdles at Ascot.


Watch Reve De Sivola win the Long Walk Hurdle in 2014


Yet he was still capable and to this day Williams maintains he, and the horse’s owners, made the correct decision to run.

“What happened at Kelso was truly awful but I never once before the race thought we were unjustified in running him,” the trainer says. “We didn’t feel he was too old or past it and actually went there thinking he had a great chance.”

Who are we to disagree? Williams knew Reve De Sivola better than anyone, the pair forming a genuine kinship over the course of 11 years from the time the trainer bought the horse as a yearling for a paltry €6,000 at the Arqana sales in December 2006.

Nurtured by Williams and his team over the next two years, Reve De Sivola hit the track for the first time in October 2008 and on only his second start gave an early glimpse of his latent potential, when third in Grade 2 company at Cheltenham.

“I purchased him as a yearling in a public auction at Deauville but he had a proper jumping pedigree and the intention was always to go down that route with him,” Williams says.

“I rode him at home most of the time and I groomed him and developed an affinity with him over the course of his life. He almost felt like a pet really.

“He was always very big, forward juvenile so it made sense to go to the bigger races on the galloping tracks early on because of the type of horse he was. He was big, scopey and that made the better-grade races more appealing.”

A succession of promising Graded performances in defeat followed and by the spring of 2008 Reve De Sivola was already rated 143, ready to enter his novice hurdler season as one of Britain’s top young prospects.

His maiden tag was shed on his first start of the 2009-10 season, when he pulverised his rivals in the Persian War at Chepstow by nine lengths before stepping two starts later to break his Grade 1 duck in the Challow Hurdle at Newbury.

“He didn’t change a massive amount in the first summer after he started racing to be honest,” says Williams, who was already enjoying an excellent spell at the time owing in large part to the exploits of another talented performer in Diamond Harry.

“He was already very good as a juvenile and had a rating of 143 going into his novice season. That meant he was going to prove tough to beat despite the fact he was still a maiden.”

Reve De Sivola and Daryl Jacob (left) jump the last before giving winning chase to Zarkandar in the 2014 Long Walk Hurdle at Ascot
Reve De Sivola: won ten times during careerCredit: Alan Crowhurst (Getty Images)

More success followed for Reve De Sivola, finishing a narrow runner-up in the Neptune Investments Novices’ Hurdle (now the Ballymore) at the festival and victory in the Grade 1 Champion Novices’ Hurdle at Punchestown.

If any had been dubious as to the true depth of the horse’s talents, by the spring of 2010 there could be no argument that this was a legitimate Grade 1 performer and one of Britain and Ireland’s brightest young talents.

“He ended up winning two Grade 1 races that season and jumped the last upsides at Cheltenham, so he was right at the top of the league of novices that season. He really was of the best,” says Williams.

“That said, I’m not sure at the time if we appreciated just how good he was going to be. We had other classy horses at a similar time to him who had also reached similar levels, Diamond Harry springs to mind, so he didn’t stand out immediately as being the best I would ever train.

“We then went novice chasing with him and although he won at Cheltenham, he wasn’t a natural jumper of fences. It wasn’t the plan to go back over hurdles but he didn’t have the same spark as a chaser that he did over hurdles.

“After he failed to spark in three chase starts the following season we gave him a year-long break because he had a leg issue. We’d been running him over steadily longer trips over fences and he was bred to be a stayer so we had no problem immediately putting him in at three miles over fences.”

This would prove to be the key decision in Reve De Sivola’s career. A permanent return to a discipline he was just more comfortable with and one in which he had already proven his ability at the top level.

He left no time to validate his trainer’s U-turn. Second to the incomparable Big Buck’s at odds of 33-1 in the Long Distance Hurdle at Newbury on his first start for just shy of a year, attentitions then turned to the Long Walk.

In the absence of Big Buck’s, Reve De Sivola was sent off the 9-2 second favourite and was simply superb, taking up the running at halfway and pulverising a field of seven headed by future Hennessy winner Smad Place.

“To achieve what he did, almost immediately, was beyond my expectations,” confesses Williams. “He’d been off for some time and was beaten comprehensively by Big Buck’s at Newbury but he came back and won his first Long Walk pretty easily in the end.

“Of course, we were helped by the fact that Big Buck’s didn’t run in the race and that left the door ajar, but there can be no denying that he was the pick of the bunch after Big Buck’s. He showed that at Ascot.

“He went on to have a great season, winning the Cleeve before putting up excellent displays in defeat at both Cheltenham and Punchestown before winning the Grade 1 at Auteuil in the autumn of 2013.

“His win there meant that by the time he was eight he had already won Grade 1s in Britain, Ireland and France. He just ticked all the boxes really. He was tough, he stayed and he was so durable; those were the assets that really made him stand out.”

Reve De Sivola was by now a full-fledged top-class racehorse and familiar name in all the big staying hurdles in Britain and Ireland. His domestic campaign in 2013 began with a third in the Long Distance and Newbury before scooping his second Long Walk.

Sent off at 9-4, he did not quite match the dominance of his 14-length win 12 months previously but he still pulled ten clear of Salubrious to become one of only three horses, the others being Big Buck’s and Barracuda, to win Long Walks in back-to-back years.

He was back again for his hat-trick in 2014 but was made to work harder than before, battling in typically game style from the front to hold off Zarkandar in a pulsating clash on ground arguably firmer than his optimum.

Reflecting on the Ascot dominance, William says: “The first two years we went to Ascot for the Long Walk the ground was very testing and that could not have suited him better. He was a big, strong horse
and therefore he had the power to carve through those sorts of conditions.”

Reve De Sivola will be honoured in this year's Long Walk Hurdle at Ascot
Reve De Sivola: won the Long Walk in 2012, 2013 and 2014Credit: Jan Kruger

That victory, in front of the grandstand he had made his own the three previous winters, would be Reve De Sivola’s final success at the top level.

Denied a four-timer in 2015 by the burgeoning superstar that was Thistlecrack, he never returned to his Grade 1 best but did reserve a throwback display in the Rendlesham Hurdle in 2016 at the age of 11.

For Williams, the victory underlined all the qualities responsible for catapulting Reve De Sivola into the big time. The Rendlesham win, which turned out to be his last, was so satisfying because it was his quintessential kind of display,” he says.

“He had testing ground over three miles to let his toughness shine through. He was ridden positively by Richard Johnson that day and whenever he got into a rhythm like that in those conditions he was very difficult to get past.

“These horses don’t come along that often and nowadays I think they’re even more difficult to find. A lot of horses I look at nowadays are so much smaller in general and without his sort of quality.

“If they are bigger, that means they are often clumsy and slow. Finding horses like him who are big but also athletic and powerful is very difficult. I was lucky really that I was in the right place at the right time when I bought him.

“He was a very important horse for me, for the owners and for the yard. He gave us our biggest exposure to Grade 1 racing and helped set the precedent for all of our subsequent big-race winners. He meant a lot.”

Fans Favourites' is a feature in the Racing Post Weekender in which we talk to those closest to racing's most popular horses and find out why they pluck on our heartstrings. Out every Wednesday


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The Weekender is out every Wednesday and is available at all good stores. You can also download the edition from 9pm on Tuesday evening


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Tom WardRacing Post Reporter

Published on 16 December 2020inFeatures

Last updated 09:19, 16 December 2020

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