Make no mistake. It was another Cheltenham bloodbath for the UK horses. Even if the first day’s four wins offered a crumb of comfort. It was only four beats three because once Constitution Hill fell halfway round in the Champion Hurdle, it needed another catastrophe from State Man to gift the race to Golden Ace.
Fair play to Jeremy Scott, having the audacity to run the seven-year-old mare Golden Ace against the stars. She had won five of her seven starts over hurdles yet, on 144, she languished 31lb lower on official ratings behind Constitution Hill; 24 lb behind State Man, from both of whom she was receiving 7lb; and 19lb behind fellow mare Betterdaysahead.
As well as Jeremy Scott’s enterprise in running her here rather in the mares’ race (at her owner’s behest, according to the soundbites) where she would have encountered (and likely been put in her place) by the peerless Lossiemouth, the UK also picked up, via the James Owen-trained Burdett Road, a touch short of £100k for second. He was a 66/1 shot with no-hoper Winter Fog, presumably there to pick up a few quid place money for the voracious, but very pleasantly so, Willie Mullins. His third place earned just short of 50 grand, amounting to a quarter of all his earnings in 26 races.
The one-two-three were respectively 25/1, 66/1 and 150/1 and if you expected a bumper payout on the Tricast, using the old multiplier formula, you would have been disappointed. It was not much more than 4000/1, ten times the Exacta, but then the firms these days are too cute to resort to outdated models for payouts.
It was a week when the “certainties” by and large proved anything but. Even before Tuesday’s Champion Hurdle, another of the meeting’s “knocking” bets, Majborough, came unstuck in the Arkle Chase. The potential for a proper race and one that would possibly have been the highlight of the meeting evaporated when Sir Gino was scratched, leaving Majborough as the two-to-one on favourite on the day, the same price as Constitution Hill would be later.
Majborough threw away his chance with a couple of major errors and some lesser ones. Jango Baie, for the Henderson/de Boinville team, stepped in for early meeting confidence, soon to be punctured by the Champion Hurdle misadventure.
Another odds-on saviour for the bookmakers was Jonbon in the Queen Mother Champion Chase on Day Two. One awful mistake left him with too much ground to make up and the way he did try to retrieve it still left many believing his status as the best two-mile chaser in training hadn’t been deposed. I would question that because of the terrific performance of Barry Connell’s Marine Nationale.
Marine Nationale had won the opening race at the 2023 Festival, the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, ridden by the late Michael O’Sullivan, and this year that race was renamed in his honour. Emotional and its variants are words over-used in sports writing, but there was fully deserved and deeply felt emotion aplenty all around Cheltenham, re-doubled when Jazzie Matty, Michael’s winner in the Boodles Juvenile Hurdle that same day in 2023, also repeated a win, this time for Cian Collins rather than Gordon Elliott, in the Grand Annual.
I was talking to Brian Meehan the other day. He told me he was a second cousin to the brilliant young jockey and says his relative’s death had been the “most awful news we’ve had around the racing world for many years. He was so young and it happened in a flash. It was a sad, sad day.”
I’m sorry, I can’t be dealing with the “looking down on us” attitude, in full flow in relation to the late John Hales after the Sir Alex Ferguson mob had their big win at the meeting with Caldwell Potter which made all impressively from the front in the Grade 2 Jack Richards Novices’ Handicap Chase under Harry Cobden.
That brought a £64k win prize to be shared among such luminaries as Sir Alex, the late Mr Hales’s estate, Fred Done et al.
If a race is worth £64k to the winner, possibly £55k will go to the owners. Caldwell Potter was bought out of the Gordon Elliott stable last year for €740k. He would need to win another ten at a similar level to get close to the purchase price and there’s nothing in the way of stud fees to be derived from him, so it’s prizemoney or bust.
Such is the tangled logic of racing – probably derived from football where £20 million players can be described as “for nothing” – that listening on the car radio that day, as I had an important errand to fulfil, I heard at least two otherwise sane individuals declaring him “well worth the money”. Not if it was yours, mate!
The James Owen/Gredley team, delighted with Burdett Road’s effort, went into Friday’s Triumph Hurdle on father-figure Bill’s 92nd birthday – so he’s even older than me, just! – with high hopes for East India Dock.
True, he had a smart domestic opponent in the Henderson-trained and twice-raced unbeaten ex-French Lulamba to beat, but he seemed to have the rest covered. Especially so as Willie Mullins had not revealed any of this season’s expensive French intake worth much more than a hill of beans, as they used to say. Still 5/4 did look a trifle short.
But when Willie doesn’t have obvious quality, as with Fact To File, maybe the most impressive by the Thursday of the week, he can always call on quantity. In the old days, before the insidious opportunity of the Fred Winter, all the good juveniles went for the Triumph and the last thing that could have happened would have been a newcomer getting into the race.
But so limited are the expectations, particularly of the home team, that Mullins (a) could be allowed to run 11 in one race, something I abhor, and (b) could saddle three of them for the first time over jumps.
Much was made of the 100/1 win of Poniros, a 200,000gns buy out of the Ralph Beckett stable from where it ran in the colours of Amo Racing. Here it sported the blue of Tony Bloom, owner of Brighton and Hove Albion FC. Nobody I spoke to beforehand dreamt he was worth the buying price. In the words of the radio commentators from the day before, he was “a snip” or “a gift”. Time will tell but he picked up East India Dock at the last and kept going better than Lulamba on his way to ten wins on the week for his trainer.
There is method in his madness. Last year, Mullins had the Triumph one-two with Majborough and Kargese. Before the Triumph, the filly Kargese already had a rating of 141. She went on to be second to Sir Gino at Aintree and won the Grade 1 juvenile at Punchestown. Her form this season amounted to one run in the UK, a promising second to Take No Chances, who had been an excellent third to Lossiemouth on the meeting’s opening day when her rating of 140 looked idiotically low. That run showed it should have been much nearer 150.
What was Kargese’s mark on Friday? You’ve got it, still 141 after her second in the Triumph and at Aintree, a Grade 1 win at Punchestown and a solid first run back in the UK.
There was an equally give-away mark in the meeting finale, the race that finally got Gordon Elliott off the mark after a frustrating week. Wodhooh, winner of all six of her races over jumps, using some soft touches over here on the way, and hardly harming her mark, also ran off 141 in the Martin Pipe. Again, she should have been nearer 150. Our horses win a race or two and go up in lumps, their Irish counterparts get a much easier ride. We mustn’t upset them!
One race that Mullins would have expected to win was a third Gold Cup, but Galopin Des Champs was rendered statuesque from the last fence by Inothewayurthinkin. Much was made of the 25 grand it cost JP McManus to supplement the Gavin Cromwell-trained seven-year-old – a fiver to you or me? He was rated 17lb his rival’s inferior but beat him six lengths at levels. The Grand National looks a formality with its much more park-like nature these days, assuming this effort hasn’t left its mark. I hope he runs again, I’d love to see an odds-on shot in the Grand National!
The other Mullins shock was Ballyburn in the three-mile Brown Advisory Novice Chase on Wednesday. The 8/13 chance had drawn admirers from friends and family far and wide, such was the anticipation. Instead of winning, though, he trailed home in fifth after a poor round of jumping. Mullins’ scatter-gun approach paid off here, too, Lecky Watson at 20/1 doing the honours.
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There was other racing going on elsewhere last week, and Hughie Morrison was apoplectic at the non-publicised so-called rule from the BHB that when only three are declared for a race at the 48-hour stage, that race is abandoned. He had his improving chaser Filanderer in at Doncaster on Friday and soon after the 10 a.m. Wednesday deadline, was told just that. Eight grand in prizemoney swallowed up into the money machine that is BHA administration.
On Sunday, two of the chases at the Market Rasen meeting attracted a deadline total of four runners each. By the time they were listed on Saturday, already one had come out of each race. Hughie asks, “Why weren’t they abandoned at that stage. Another race last week went ahead with a final field of three. I would like to know, whether this so-called BHA policy has ever been notified to trainers, or is it just another example of their total disregard for owners and trainers’ rights!”
- TS
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