Paul Nicholls plays down Cheltenham fears over coughing in yard

Paul Nicholls said on Tuesday that his disclosure the previous day that some of his string are coughing had been "a little bit blown out of proportion" and that the great majority of his horses remain unaffected. "We did a load more tests this morning," Nicholls said after saddling Dualla Lord to finish third in a novice hurdle here, "and I suspect a huge number will be absolutely fine, with maybe one or two we need to treat." Nicholls has dominated National Hunt racing so thoroughly for the past seven years that any report of illness in his stable less than a month before the Festival would inevitably concern punters who have backed horses such as Kauto Star and Big Bucks's to win at Cheltenham in mid-March. If Nicholls is seriously concerned about his string's health, however, he was hiding it very well, as he insisted that the infection is having little impact on the pre-Festival training regimes of his horses. "If you walked round the stables you wouldn't hear any coughing," Nicholls said. "It's probably the worst we've ever had it [at this time of year], but you always get a few little niggles, and having said that, we're only talking about 10 or 12 or so out of 120, and a lot of the others have run really well. "I cancelled the press morning [which was scheduled for Wednesday] because it would have been the right thing to have done, and of course then I have to announce that it's cancelled, and everything gets a little bit blown out of proportion. It's probably the worst we've ever had it, but having said that, you're only talking about 10 or 12 horses. "We schooled a load this morning, and Zarkandar [who coughed after winning the Betfair Hurdle last Friday] was back cantering. If we know that something's not quite right, we'll just give them a couple of quiet days." Nicholls had three declared runners here, two of which had previous form, and though Edgardo Sol was unplaced in the Bathwick Tyres Handicap Hurdle, Duella Lord ran a sound race to finish third in the opening novice hurdle and Foggy's Wall finished second in the concluding race of the day. "It's not a bad one where they're not eating, that's when you're in trouble," Nicholls said, "but there's not one that's like that at all, so we should be OK. "I probably would have said something anyway [regardless of the scheduled media day], there's no point saying everything is all right when it's not. It takes the pressure off if you're up front, rather than trying to say that you haven't got a problem. "What happens is that they pick something up on the racecourse and the stress of the race brings it out. The only one that [of the main Festival contenders] that I really wanted to run [before Cheltenham] was Zarkandar, and none of the others need to run anyway. Nothing has missed any work yet, so we'll just monitor the situation. Dildar [a possible runner in the Triumph Hurdle] is running this weekend, but all the others have done what we wanted to do. "Zarkandar had a snotty nose the day after he won [the Betfair Hurdle] at Newbury, but straight away we gave him some antibiotics, and we cantered him this morning. Kauto Star, Big Buck's, Join Together, Al Ferof and four or five others were tested on Sunday and they were all absolutely 100%."