In the late 1970s Doncaster had no jumps meetings between the end of the flat and January. A new fixture was created on Friday and Saturday 18-19 December 1980. Races that weren’t sponsored were named after horses with a Yorkshire connection. One of them was the Saucy Kit Novice Hurdle, which was run at that pre-Christmas meeting until 1998.
Saucy Kit was the Champion Hurdler in 1967. Winning a 25-runner novice hurdle at Sedgefield near the end of his juvenile campaign was a sign of above-average ability, and after that he was bought for 720 guineas and sent to Peter Easterby to train at Great Habton, North Yorkshire. He proved hard to settle initially, only to become more tractable when put to rounding up cattle.
He won the Speedicut Handicap Hurdle at Doncaster in November 1965. In addition to the prize money, the owner, trainer and rider of the winner were each given a pocket knife worth £4. That turned out to be his last run of the season. The year after he came back better than ever, winning another handicap on Town Moor in October and conditions races at Wolverhampton and Kempton before landing the Cheltenham feature. It was Easterby’s first runner at the National Hunt Festival.
Doncaster wasn’t in Easterby’s good books in the period before the race. First he was refused permission to give the horse a racecourse gallop. Peeved, he found a strip of ground on the inside of the circuit and exercised Saucy Kit on that instead. It may have been counter-productive, for before long the horse had bruised his foot and was lame. “Salt and water got him right,” Easterby told the Yorkshire Post fifty years later. The ground had came right for him – rattling fast. “I had a few quid on the horse. The day before the race I had my money on at 33-1. You couldn’t get the price the next morning. You would think no-one had had time to sleep.”
Even more remarkable was the fact that Saucy Kit was a colt. He won only once more after the Champion Hurdle, and later proved a good sire of National Hunt horses. His progeny Mr Quick and Sam Da Vinci were multiple winners and the hunter chaser Flying Ace won 59 races under Rules and in the point-to-point arena.
Sources include:
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/country-and-farming/weekend-interview-self-made-peter-easterby-still-hurdles-king-1781178
https://www.yorkshire.com/inspiration/features/the-muhammad-ali-of-racing