NICKY Henderson’s Altior (1/3 Fav) remains unbeaten over fences as he made a winning reappearance in the G2 Betfair Exchange Chase at Newbury on Saturday.

The eight-year-old landed the G1 Arkle Novices’ Chase and G1 Celebration Chase last spring, but had been on the sidelines so far this season after undergoing a wind operation.

Held up by Nico de Boinville in last of the three runners, Altior made smooth progress to challenge Politologue (Paul Nicholls/Sam Twiston-Davies, 5/2) at the last and surged clear on the run-in to score by a comfortable four lengths.

Valdez (Alan King/Wayne Hutchinson, 25/1) was another 13 lengths adrift in third.

Henderson said: “If I had dreamt what was going to happen, that would’ve been just about it. He took a blow between the last two, but it was exactly what we wanted and he didn’t make a noise.

“He is in brilliant form. He’s travelled well, he has so many gears and he is just pure class. He’s very good. His work is so easy and while we have a wonderful bunch of horses, not many can go with him so it’s quite hard to sacrifice horses to work with him.”

He continued: “There must be a lot of improvement in him. His weight was good, he wasn’t far off where he should be.

“He is not going to run again until March so hopefully there are no further issues or problems, but you have to say that was just perfection.

“Altior has to win in March and then he is getting close to the big boys’ shoes. We have always said that they are very, very big feet and this guy’s feet are getting a little bit bigger as we move along, but that was a big step in a big direction.”

Meanwhile, Kalashnikov (Amy Murphy/Jack Quinlan, 11st 5lb, 8/1 Co Fav) was the impressive winner of the £155,000 Betfair Hurdle, and Native River (Colin Tizzard/Richard Johnson, 8/11 Fav) became the first horse to win back-to-back renewals of the G2 Betfair Denman Chase.

He is now likely to have another crack at the Cheltenham Gold Cup, a race in which he finished third in 2017.