When Palladium was knocked down for €1.4m (£1.2m) at a sales ring in France last October, the underbidder was a major Australian owner with long-term dreams of the Melbourne Cup. One more bid might have seen the 2024 German Derby winner on a plane down under, to spend Christmas and the new year in the agreeable warmth of the Australian summer ahead of the spring carnival at Flemington in November.

Instead, there was a shake of the head, and so it was that on a wet, chilly January afternoon in Cambridgeshire, Palladium cantered to the start on Thursday in the maroon colours of Lady Bamford, ready to become the most expensive horse ever sent over jumps.

Six-figure buys from the point-to-pointing field have become common currency at the Cheltenham festival in recent years as the four-day meeting has grown to dominate the winter game, but they have at least proved that they can jump an obstacle at speed. A seven-figure Classic winner who remains an “entire” – meaning that Palladium has not been gelded – and has never left the ground in public is rather different, and there was significant egg-on-face potential as the £1.2m horse set off for a maiden hurdle worth £4,221 to the winner.

Four minutes and eight increasingly proficient jumps later, Palladium was off the mark over timber, having eased into the lead after the third-last hurdle. The backers who sent him off at 8-15 had a slight moment of concern as Wolf Moon, a 50-1 outsider, made some headway between the final two flights, but Nico de Boinville, on Palladium, was always holding him off after a fluent jump at the last.

The bare form was not within hailing distance of the mark set by another Henderson-trained four-year-old, Lulamba, at Ascot five days ago, and Paddy Power saw fit to ease Palladium out to 16-1 (from 12-1) for the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham in March, for which Lulamba is the 6-4 favourite.

Henderson, though, saw plenty of reasons to be positive at the start of what could a long year for Palladium.

“From my point of view, he gets 10 out of 10,” the trainer said. “I can’t see what else he could have done. He was very professional, jumped well from beginning to end, and we’re very mindful of what’s ahead of him in the summer.

“He’s the only colt that I’ve got [at the stable], and one’s always conscious that they might need quite a lot more work than a gelding. We’ve done lots of schooling but very little galloping with him, and I was nervous whether we’d done enough. He certainly wasn’t 100% and Nico said there was a lot of improvement to come out of that.

“Our first take is that another run would do him good, and that almost certainly means the Adonis [Hurdle at Kempton on 22 February].”

While the Triumph Hurdle remains the most obvious immediate target for Palladium, not least because Lord Bamford, his owner’s husband, is the “B” in JCB, which sponsors Cheltenham’s juvenile championship, the four-year-old could also keep Henderson a little busier than usual over the summer and into the autumn.

“This whole project includes his stallion potential,” Henderson said. “The Hardwicke [at Royal Ascot in June] or something like that would be the sort of race you’d be thinking of. Change out of the winter woollies, and no more Barbours and cloth caps.”

The Cheltenham festival, though, will always be the most significant date in Henderson’s calendar, and the preparations for this year’s meeting are in full swing with Constitution Hill, the stable’s biggest star and Champion Hurdle favourite, due to line up for the Unibet Hurdle at Cheltenham’s Trials day on Saturday.

“Every day is busy now,” Henderson said. “You get that nervous one [Palladium] out of the way and walk straight into Constitution Hill in two days time and so it starts again.

“We’ll hopefully be walking into the gates of Cheltenham in a few weeks’ time with the horses in the form that they’re in now, that’s the important thing. That’s the big job now, to hold it where we are with all the horses running well.”