Romeo Coolio overtook Irish Panther in a thrilling race to the line to take victory in the Grade One Novice Chase feature race on the opening day of the Leopardstown Christmas Festival on Friday.<\/p>\n
Ridden by Jack Kennedy and trained by Gordon Elliott, the 8\/15 favourite stayed the stronger to win by half a length after two miles.<\/p>\n
The winner had trailed by three lengths when the horses jumped the second last fence but produced a brilliant staying performance in the final stages to overhaul the leader.<\/p>\n
July Flower came home third of the nine runners, with He’s Gorgeous fourth.<\/p>\n
“He’s a very tough horse, very honest, jumps great,” Elliott said of Romeo Coolio when speaking to RTE after the race.<\/p>\n
“The horse showed a great attitude.”<\/p>\n
The six-year-old had already proved effective over the two-mile distance over hurdles last season, striking Grade One gold at Leopardstown’s Dublin Racing Festival before being placed in the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle at Cheltenham and at Aintree.<\/p>\n
Each of his two starts over fences to date had come at two and a half miles, with an impressive chasing debut at Down Royal followed by a brilliant victory in the Drinmore Novice Chase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Romeo Coolio overtook Irish Panther in a thrilling race to the line to take victory in the Grade…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-213063","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}