A decision has yet to be made on his future plans.
For all the huge publicity Constitution Hill generated for Friday night’s racing on his Flat debut, Nicky Henderson is aware he could “undo that in 10 seconds” if the worst were to happen at Cheltenham.
The Seven Barrows trainer remained undecided on Saturday on whether his superstar would remain on the Flat for an intriguing high-level career or return to the hurdles at Cheltenham after falling over obstacles in three of his last four starts.
The scenes at the Nottinghamshire circuit were almost unprecedented, with a capacity crowd cheering every step Oisin Murphy’s horse took as he rode home nine and a half lengths.
“I hope and I would like to think it has done a lot of good (for racing),” Henderson told ITV Racing.
“It was a crazy idea, I just wanted a race and it turned out to be much more than that. It was the most amazing night, the atmosphere was just crazy.”
When asked how much responsibility for the sport concerns him, Henderson said: “Of course, we know the situation we are in and we are fortunate that we have to make these kinds of decisions.
“It’s not easy, we have to sit down, we’ve been sitting for a long time as you can imagine. There was no point in doing that last night or even this morning.”
“The plan is to teach him again this week with Yogi Breisner, we have done a lot of that and it is going fantastically well – Nico (de Boinville) is very happy with him.
“It keeps an option open, but there’s a lot of responsibility behind what we decide to do. We have to keep that in mind. Hopefully he’s done a lot for the race front page there, to give it that kind of publicity, but on the other hand, I could undo that in ten seconds if it all went pear-shaped and we’re well aware of that.”
He added: “I thought about it (running on the Flat) a few years ago, I must admit, but you could never have expected what we saw last night, it was staggering.
“Let’s see, it’s a big ask, but here we go.”
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