Dual-purpose star Overturn
Donald McCain’s fantastic season continued on Saturday when Peddlers Cross maintained his unbeaten record over fences and Overturn added the G1 Fighting Fifth Hurdle to his burgeoning record.
Of the two stable-mates, it may be Peddlers Cross who receives the lion’s share of the publicity but Overturn, as the only horse ever to complete Newcastle’s Northumberland Plate-Fighting Fifth double, is quickly becoming a dual-purpose stand-out, with ratings of 106 on the Flat and 164 over hurdles.
The Flat-bred son of Barathea, a graduate of Peter Harris’s Pendley Farm, is out of the Kris mare Kristal Bridge, a daughter of one of Pendley’s foundation mares Connaught Bridge.
Overturn’s yearling half-brother, by another Sadler’s Wells stallion, Beat Hollow, was sold recently at Tattersalls’ December Sale and fetched 50,000gns when knocked down to ‘Overturn’. He too will be running in Tim Leslie’s increasingly ubiquitous yellow, grey and blue silks.
Likely to make just one more appearance before the Cheltenham Festival, Overturn is being primed for the Champion Hurdle, in which he was seventh last year having made much of the early running. He won his first race, a Sandown maiden, in the August of his two-year-old season on only his second start and, now seven, he has 11 victories to his name, including back-to-back Graded wins over hurdles this season.
