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One of Sir Alex Ferguson’s most exciting jumpers threw his immediate campaign into disarray when he flopped on his first test of the season at Exeter on Friday. Kalif Du Berlais, owned by the legendary former Manchester United manager and three others, had won five out of eight since joining Paul Nicholls and emerged as a live contender for the 2026 Queen Mother Champion Chase with a Grade 1 victory at Aintree in April. Ahead of his first appearance since in the Haldon Gold Cup at Exeter, 14-time champion jumps trainer Nicholls made no secret of his expectations for the horse. The trainer of six Champion Chase winners described Kalif Du Berlais as “in terms of potential, he’d be right up with the best two-mile chasers I have trained”. But very little of that promise was on display at Exeter as the 13-8 favourite weakened without taking a shot at all the way winner Thistle Ask, winning for the third time in 13 days and part of a treble for brothers Dan and Harry Skelton. Afterwards Kalif Du Berlais’s jockey Harry Cobden said: “He travelled fine and jumped okay, but the writing was on the wall going to the last down the back, for me anyway. “We’ll get him back. He actually felt like he wanted a trip. That’s what horses do – they make you look silly when you think you are going to win but there you go.” Nicholls’s daughter Megan, who was working for ITV , said her Dad would have been frustrated by the performance. “We heard Dad speaking about him, bullish beforehand,” she said. “I guess it’s going to be a case of slightly back to square one. “On the back of that you’d be thinking he’s not going to be going for a Tingle Creek. If you’re being realistic he is not going to be competitive, but we know that is way below his best. “You’re hoping that you get him home and something shows up that explains a below par run. If he isn’t quite as good as we hoped, who knows, but irrelevant of that he has not run to his best level. That is what’s clear to see. “At an early stage I said to Alice he’s not winning today. For me he didn’t travel with a zest, jump with a zest or look as comfortable as I’ve seen him before so clearly something was not quite right. “I know people are going to think he’s just a talking horse but it wasn’t his day. There’s always another day.”
