The 2023 Cheltenham Festival opens two weeks on Tuesday, the significant trials have all been run and the ante-post markets suggest British jumping stables face another almighty pasting at the hands of their Irish counterparts in the West Country next month.
Ireland left Cheltenham with “just” 18 of the 28 winners last year, five down on their record haul of 23 in 2021. Any lingering hopes on the home side that Irish dominance might be waning, however, now seem woefully premature. Just six of the 28 races at the meeting next month have a British-trained favourite, while Willie Mullins alone has the favourite or joint-favourite in 13. Ireland’s perennial champion is quoted at around 7-4 to either equal or extend his own record of 10 winners at a single Festival, which he set 12 months ago, and could conceivably get the dozen he needs to become the first trainer to saddle 100 Festival winners.
It is quite the contrast with Britain’s current champion, Paul Nicholls, who has topped the trainers table 11 times in all, including three of the past four campaigns.
Leicester
2.00 Great Heart’Jac 2.30 Auditoria 3.00 Flann 3.30 Keplerian 4.00 Solomon Grey 4.30 Santon
Catterick Bridge
2.15 Mortlach 2.45 Kavanaghs Cross 3.15 Sabbathical 3.45 Chase A Fortune 4.15 Betty Baloo 4.45 Golden Cosmos
Southwell
5.00 The Tron 5.30 Sugar Hill Babe 6.00 Six Strings 6.30 Mighty River (nb) 7.00 Local Bay 7.30 Galileo Glass 8.00 Elisheva (nap) 8.30 Billian
Nicholls has drawn a blank at the past two Festivals, has saddled a total of 45 runners at the meeting without success since Politologue supplied his only win of the 2020 meeting in the Champion Chase, and had just nine runners in total in 2022, just one of which even reached the frame.
Those figures might look a little rosier if Nicholls had not felt obliged to scratch Bravemansgame from the Brown Advisory Novice Chase last year when the ground turned heavy, but it is still a million miles from the days when horses such as Kauto Star, Master Minded and Denman were pre-eminent.
Nicholls does at least have a likely Festival favourite this time around, as Hermes Allen, unbeaten in three starts including the Grade One Challow Hurdle in December, is a worthy market leader for the Ballymore Novice Hurdle. Bravemansgame, the King George winner at Christmas, is also a serious contender to give Nicholls a fifth success in the Gold Cup, which would equal Tom Dreaper’s record and would also be the champion trainer’s first win in the race since 2009.
“I don’t know how he’ll get on up that hill, no one knows,” Nicholls said at an open morning at his yard on Monday, “but it was the same with Kauto Star. We didn’t know if he was going to get three-and-a-quarter miles because he’d been winning at Kempton, but he did.
“He’s the best staying chaser in England, I think he’s proved that, and now he’s got to go and run probably the biggest race of his life.”
Nicky Henderson, the only trainer apart from Nicholls to have won the title since Martin Pipe retired at the end of the 2004-05 season, is also the only British trainer with more than one Festival favourite in the current betting. Several of his major hopes for the meeting – including Constitution Hill, the odds-on favourite for the Champion Hurdle – are due to exercise at Kempton Park on Tuesday morning.
But even if all of Britain’s main contenders – including horses such as Edwardstone, the second-favourite for the Champion Chase – run up to their best, the betting suggests the home team will do well to reach double figures over the four days. Mullins, meanwhile, is likely to beat the combined might of British National Hunt racing all by himself.
Whether the racegoers at Cheltenham will be too concerned about the nationality of a winner so long as it is carrying their money is doubtful, to say the least. Britain has not supplied the majority of the Festival winners since 2016 and the fans still keep coming back.
The possible effect on the rest of the jumps season, though, remains a cause for concern. The big Saturday cards and Grade Ones that provide the narrative throughout the winter could start to seem a little pointless – to owners and punters alike – if the winners are then swept aside in the spring.
If, as some insist, it is “all part of a cycle” which will turn around in due course, then there is, of course, nothing to worry about. But there is little hard evidence that Ireland’s hegemony at Cheltenham has even peaked as yet, never mind started to wane, and the longer it continues the more likely it becomes that it is here to stay.
