JONBON continued his preparation for the Queen Mother Champion Chase with a little help from 20-time champion rider A.P. McCoy on Thursday morning and the J.P. McManus-owned chaser is exciting his trainer Nicky Henderson ahead of a rematch with El Fabiolo at the Festival.

“He’d love to ride him himself!” said Henderson, when asked by members of the press for the verdict of McCoy. “Of all the horses, I know he would love to ride him. He’d suit him. Anybody could ride him but he’d take a bit of knowing as well.

“A.P. has watched him school so many hundreds of times. There’s one fence in our row of five fences – the middle one he always meets it on the wrong side but it’s where he’s most impressive. He can just dance – one, two, three, boom – and he’s so quick.

“And yet he always meets that fence wrong. It’s a funny thing but he did it twice and exactly the same thing both times. Always meets it wrong… If Constitution Hill is straightforward then Jonbon is a little bit the opposite. He tests you a little bit.”

Jonbon was set to meet El Fabiolo last month but for a frozen track at Ascot leading to the rescheduling of the Clarence House Chase to Cheltenham, with Willie Mullins then opting to reroute the Isaac Souede and Simon Munir-owned Arkle winner to the Dublin Racing Festival.

Jonbon was then beaten at odds of 1/4 in the Grade 1 but his trainer didn’t sound too perturbed with that upset and when asked if he was worried about the eight-year-old having a hard race there he said: “No I don’t think so. He might have had a harder race than you might have thought he was likely to have from a betting angle, with people assuming he was just going to canter round and deal with it. But until he made that mistake coming down the hill everything had gone really nicely.

“I was really looking forward to Ascot with El Fabiolo. We were absolutely tip top. I was feeling really confident that day and I was really looking forward to it. We were very prepared for it.

“They’re going to go some gallop (in the Champion Chase) and I think that suits him. He wants to be going forward, forward, forward.”

SIR Gino is many people’s idea of a banker at the Cheltenham Festival where he will take on the Triumph Hurdle and his trainer did little to quash the optimism surrounding the Joe and Marie Donnelly-owned juvenile hurdler.

“He’s only had three races in his life but he’s a real pro,” Henderson said of the son of It’s Gino, who ran out an emphatic winner on Trials day at Cheltenham last month. “He’s grand. He’s a lovely big horse. I think we always thought he was very good but I didn’t want to get too carried away before we actually got to see it.

“Luckily the spies hadn’t actually latched onto him before Cheltenham – but we thought he was pretty smart. He’s only had two races for us. He had one in France before we got hold of him but he’s a very talented horse.

“He wasn’t very good at Kempton, which I was surprised about, but I think most of that was baby-ness. He hit the front and kind of thought ‘where am I?’ He missed a couple on the way and was very good at a couple, but he got very goofy on the run-in from the second last.

Henderson admitted he watched the Dublin Racing Festival expecting to see a rival to trouble him at Cheltenham, but he continued: “The race I was watching most carefully at the ‘Willie Mullins Racing Festival’ (DRF) was the four-year-old hurdle to see what they’ve got.

“It looked as if they finished in a bit of a heap but I was expecting something to jump out of that race and to see what Willie’s got, but it didn’t look obvious. There were some nice horses in there, don’t get me wrong, but there was nothing that could do what Sir Gino did at Cheltenham that day.”