Half Free Had A Whole Load Of Talent

Graham Buddry remembers the great Fred Winter chaser who just loved it over two and a half miles at Cheltenham

- Graham Buddry

Today we have the most amazing space age computers which anyone can buy with memory, computing power and speed to make almost anything simple. It wasn’t always that way.

Way back in the early Seventies I relied on a very basic racing diary. I recorded my profit and loss along with any notes I thought worthy of inclusion. Two horses I made special note of back then were Prince Eleigh (he never came to anything much) and April Seventh who went on to be a chaser of great note…not too bad spotting for someone just entering their teenage years.

Fast forward to the early Eighties and I’d upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum ZX. It was basic enough that even I could write a racing program and transfer onto it all my copiously hand-written notes from cards held in a red, alphabetised box I was using by then. Each card bore the name of a horse with its preferred going and distance etc and my own personal rating but one horse had a unique entry.

Regular readers will know the high esteem I’ve always held Fred Winter in, that master trainer from Uplands in Lambourn. He had the best horses around but even his lesser lights would have been stars in other stables, such as Fifty Dollars More, Observe, Brown Chamberlin and many others. And there was also Half Free, who, when input on the old Spectrum read simply and in capital letters, “DO NOT OPPOSE AT CHELTENHAM OVER 2½ MILES”. It was the only horse which had anything so specific written about it and I thought that today we would look into that statement.

The Deep Run gelding proved a useful enough novice in his only season over timber, winning all three starts over the minimum distance, including one at Cheltenham, before starting favourite for the 1982 Supreme Novice’s where he failed to cope with the sheer speed of the real specialist two milers.