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Horse Racing: Might Bite smooth winner of Aintree Bowl

Might Bite jumps the last prior to winning the Betway Bowl Chase on day one of the Grand National meeting.
Might Bite jumps the last prior to winning the Betway Bowl Chase on day one of the Grand National meeting.Photograph: David Davies/PA

Might Bite made up for his Gold Cup defeat by landing the Betway Bowl on day one of the Grand National festival, comfortably pulling clear of Bristol De Mai. He will now be put away for the summer with the Jockey Club’s £1m for winning three major races as his target next season.

“It was quite brave coming here,” said Nicky Henderson, the winning trainer, who walked the course in the morning in the hope of finding it had dried out a bit. “It’s definitely soft enough,” he said. “It wasn’t Cheltenham soft but it was very hard work.”

In the end, he decided the horse could take his chance and was rewarded with a Grade One victory, his second of the afternoon, following We Have a Dream in the juvenile hurdle. As expected, Bristol De Mai made much of the running but never got away from Might Bite, who had no trouble taking the lead in the home straight and won by seven lengths.

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“That jumping out there was just an exhibition round, wasn’t it?” Henderson said. “You won’t see better. He’s all class.”

Asked about the horse’s campaign next winter, Henderson said: “The plan will be the same. I think the only thing ... we’ll have to get a little bit braver, like we did today, and go via the Betfair [at Haydock in November] and have a crack at it. It’s his age, we’ve looked after him all this time. We might have to think about Betfair, King George.”

The Jockey Club offers a £1m bonus to any horse that can win the Betfair, the King George and the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Might Bite won this season’s King George and was bested only by Native River at Cheltenham, where unusually soft ground tipped the scales against him.

Henderson got his third top-class success of the afternoon when the quirky L’Ami Serge stayed on too strongly for Supasundae in the Aintree Hurdle. “He does threaten to win races and even today, you couldn’t be confident, when he got there going to the last like that, what’s going to happen,” said the Lambourn man. “But he did win the French Champion Hurdle last year.”

L’Ami Serge still holds an entry in Saturday’s Stayers Hurdle here, though it seems unlikely that he will be turned out again so quickly. “Daryl first of all tried to tell me he’d only raced for 200 yards,” Henderson said in reference to the winning jockey, Daryl Jacob. “Then he suddenly remembered he’s riding something else on Saturday, so now he’s decided this one is knackered.”

Henderson said L’Ami Serge found his rivals quickening away from him in the Stayers at Cheltenham last month. “He wants them dying in front of him. Then he’ll come and do it.”

The New One was disappointing for the second race in a row and was pulled up.