There was no specific catalyst that made our minds up, but after yesterday’s gallop morning at Kempton one just had to say that we were going to go one way or the other and we all believe this is the correct decision.

While it might appear sad it should be remembered that it’s not ‘goodbye’, we are just changing tack and of course it’s sad, it has got to be, we still have a fit and healthy horse which is unquestionably the most important thing.

It is quite crazy when you think we are sitting on him and Sir Gino, who are simply the best two-mile hurdlers in the country, and neither of them are going to turn up at Cheltenham, which is tragic.

This has arguably been one of the hardest decisions of my training career, but we have at least lifted some of the weight off our shoulders, although I’ll tell you tomorrow morning if I slept any better the night before!

It has been horrible to be fair, but the only good thing to come out of it was at Southwell on Friday because if he hadn’t done what he did there, who knows what we would be doing now. We do at least appear to have a very talented flat horse on our hands and hopefully we can go on and have lots of fun times with him, which did, of course make things feel a little easier.

A lot of people have said he had nothing left to prove over hurdles, but I do still think it would’ve been nice to go out on our terms rather than how things have panned out.

He’s not going anywhere, he’s not being retired, and we have lots of exciting things we can now do and it’s going to be terrific fun plotting this new campaign.

I want to have a chat with Oisin, now we know what we are doing, and see what he thinks we should be looking at next. We could run in another Novice but it’s not as if he needs the education, and at his age we might as well get on with it; he’s not a big green baby so we will probably kick on.

He will have a little break but is very fit and may have that edge on his side if we are to be looking at flat races in the spring. Many have suggested the John Porter, which I seem to remember has always been a good race, so perhaps we could start there, but then others have mentioned, Chester, Doncaster, Goodwood and Epsom, therefore we do appear to have lots of options and I’m sure we will all have plenty of fun along the way.

I would say his second G1 Christmas Hurdle win was my highlight of his jumps career because there were lots of question marks surrounding him having been off the track for a year but he answered them in no uncertain terms and truly showed what a magnificent race horse over hurdles he was – and still should be if he would only turn up and bend his knees properly over all of his obstacles!

We’ve been very lucky in the fact we’ve had plenty of very good flat horses down the years but the difference with Constitution Hill is that he is coming from the Point to Point field whereas our other flat horses originally came from the flat anyway, went jumping, but were able to revert to the level quite successfully, so he is rather bucking the trend, but everyone saw what he did at Southwell, and while we don’t know what sort of race it was, and he will obviously face stronger challenges later in the year, he’s proven he has raw natural ability and I am extremely lucky, in fact we all should be, that we have a horse ready to race and provide so much pleasure to us all because it could’ve been a whole lot different.

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