Racing: Flame burning brightly for Chance the Irish rover

The outstanding trainer of Cheltenham Gold Cup winners in recent years has a leading candidate for tomorrow's Champion Hurdle

If you follow one geographical form line, the identity of tomorrow's big-race winner on the opening day of the Cheltenham Festival, fittingly enough, jumps out at you. Flame Creek must win the Champion Hurdle.

The logic is this: soon after Noel Chance moved into Lambourn's Folly House stables, his Mr Mulligan won the 1997 Gold Cup. When Chance relocated to nearby Kings Farm he took the knack with him and captured the 1999 Royal & SunAlliance Chase with Looks Like Trouble. The peripatetic trainer's next base, at Saxon House, sent out Looks Like Trouble to win the following year's Gold Cup.

Now Flame Creek is Chance's sole throw of the dice at this year's National Hunt championships and his freshly occupied premises are now in Berkeley House stables, Upper Lambourn. "The difference is that I own this one," Chance says. "Well me and the Clydesdale Bank anyway."

Berkeley House may not be the biggest yard in the Valley Of The Racehorse, with its 47 boxes, but, as Chance gazes out from his Portakabin office, he sees a kingdom. For the first 20 years of his career, Chance was fiddling about in his Irish homeland and in obscurity, a small portion of the Curragh where even the backwaters were in danger of running dry.

"Fellows like me just didn't have runners at the Festival," he says. "It was so difficult to buy that kind of a horse in Ireland. Any time you had a good horse you had to sell it. Ireland's a nation of sellers, while England's a nation of consumers. Flame Creek is not going anywhere, but, if I was still in Ireland, he'd have been sold the day he won his bumper.

"There were plenty of times in the old days when they had to win to keep the yard afloat. Those were the days when you owed four grand and there it was in front of you. Absolutely insurmountable. Nowadays, you owe half a million and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

"Trainers are the most resilient people in the world. You always survive. Tomorrow is always a new day. Besides, I can hardly write my name and I'm qualified for precious little else."

Chance did however manage a Festival runner out of the Curragh, Knox's Corner, who unseated at the eighth in the 1992 Foxhunter Chase. "You fellows are apt to asking me when I know a race was won," he says. "On this occasion it was when I knew we had lost. And that was before they even started.

"We walked the course on the morning of the race and, when we came to the ditch, the jockey turned to me and said 'Jesus, it's very big isn't it?'. I knew straight away that courage was going to be a problem. Sure enough, he had a look of relief on his face when he fell off."

Now, at the age of 52, Chance is an established figure in Britain, a position he anticipates for the antelope-like Flame Creek, who has undergone a typical nurturing from his trainer. "Like 90 per cent of ours he's out of a field in Ireland," Chance says. "I never go to the October [Horses In Training] Sales at Newmarket to buy horses because we can break them down pretty well ourselves rather than have someone else do it for us.

"Nothing gives me greater pleasure than bringing a horse through the ranks. Then one golden morning he starts working well. That way you've always got the chance of unearthing a potential champion. If you make a mess of it then you know exactly who to blame."

If it rains this week, so will Chance's eyes. Flame Creek needs it fast. "He's very quick, but he hasn't had the chance to show that this year because of the ground," the trainer says. "He used to work with Flagship Uberalles when he was here and he'd be a quicker horse than him.

"If you see him working on an all-weather gallop he's travelling and he's impressive, but, if you get him on soft ground on grass, he hangs, he puts his head on one side and he doesn't like it. He skims over good ground and jumps much better out of it."

There have been only three races for Flame Creek this season, none particularly taxing. But then the fourth is really the only race. "I'm a believer that if you're setting out your stall to win championship races you want to chart the easiest route there," Chance says. "You're only training for one day, the be all and end all of Cheltenham.

"He's gone up 28lb from his first run and has to find another 7lb to have a realistic chance. I'm hoping firmer going will bring that improvement."

Flame Creek is 12-1 for the Champion, which is headed, in market terms, by Jonjo O'Neill's Rhinestone Cowboy, "This is one of the best Champion Hurdles in a few years," Chance says. "There's no single dominant factor like Istabraq, and that makes an open race, a serious race. I respect them all but I'm frightened by none. There's nothing to make me think 'Jesus, I wish that wasn't running'.

"Rhinestone Cowboy is an enigma. You have to be impressed by what he's done, but how much has he had up his sleeve? You watch [Norman] Williamson [the jockey] hundreds of times and you'll notice how many times he comes to the second last, or even the last, apparently with a double handful and then gets beat. This guy has the knack of getting horses to run for him without beating them up. He might not look as though he's doing much but I bet he's squeezing away there like mad. I suspect there might not be too much left with Rhinestone Cowboy. It might all be an optical illusion. The first time he came off the bridle was last year in the bumper and he got beat.

"We know Rhinestone Cowboy is pretty good, but that might be all he is. You can't say he's exceptional yet."

That is not true though about Noel Chance's championship record at Cheltenham. The most successful trainer of recent years in the Gold Cup is now chasing his first Champion Hurdle with his first runner in the race. He will go home to Berkeley House win or lose. "I'll go to Cheltenham every day, but I'll come back here every day as well," says Chance. "I wouldn't trust myself to stay down there."