• World Hurdle candidate ready for all-weather run
• Long Run unable to work owing to freezing weather
Nicky Henderson headed to Newbury for a lunchtime inspection of the track on Wednesday, admitting that abandonment of Saturday's meeting at which he is due to run stable stars Long Run and Sprinter Sacre "doesn't bear thinking about".
Henderson added that he could run leading hurdler Oscar Whisky in one of the standby National Hunt Flat races set to be activated if the scheduled jumps meeting at Kempton on Friday is abandoned in an inspection on Thursday morning.
Henderson said he was "seriously considering" running Oscar Whisky in the Kempton standby card. "Horses like him and Tetlami don't want hard races," he said. "They've got their penalties and we know where we are with them. They just want one little spin and a run in a bumper would get them there."
The trainer added: "Long Run was due to school this morning but we've had to abandon that as the fences are frozen solid. He had an away day last week with Yogi [Breisner] and jumped absolutely beautifully and he's in great form.
"It [Newbury's abandonment] doesn't even bear thinking about. You'd have to hope that they [the British Horseracing Authority] would seriously consider putting on the Denman Chase and the Game Spirit somewhere else. You'd have to hope that there's going to be flexibility, and to be fair we've been very grateful for the work they have done to get the 'jumpers' bumpers' [all-weather Flat meeting for National Hunt horses] staged at Kempton.
"There's a backlog forming up behind a lot of the novice chasers and novice hurdlers and the other thing that's very soon going to become a horrible problem is the deadline for the handicaps [at the Cheltenham Festival].
"They have to have three races and a lot of the novices are sitting on two so in the next 10 days or so there are going to be some seriously competitive races. We won't be running two in races – we'll be running three or four."