Knock Cheltenham all you like, but it’s still best week of the year

This year’s Cheltenham Festival has all the ingredients to be one of the best renewals in recent times.

A fit and well Constitution Hill - at his peak the best hurdler I have seen - versus a potentially exceptional mare in receipt of seven pounds is the opening day clash all jumps fans have been dreaming of. Throw into the mix last year’s winner of the race, and despite the small field, the Champion Hurdle promises to be the best renewal in two decades.

The Triumph Hurdle is another race this week that has all the ingredients to make it a classic. Hello Neighbour and East India Dock bring a high level of unbeaten hurdles form into the race, but the exciting Lulamba looks potentially better than the pair of them. Then you have Lulamba’s seven-figure stablemate Palladium as well as Mondo Man who were both high class on the Flat and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one of those might put it all together on the day, and that is before you consider the Willie Mullins’ representatives. Mullins has won this for the last three years with Vauban Lossiemouth and Majborough and who’s to say he won’t unearth another star on Friday with more than half the remaining entries for the race.

Galopin Des Champs domination of the staying chase division has forced a group of high quality horses to take each other on in the Ryanair Chase and that promises to be another highlight of the week with the trailblazing Il Et Francais set to clash with the last two winners of the race along with the talented Fact to File.

Galopin Des Champs is of course looking to join some of the greatest names in the history of the sport by winning his third Gold Cup in a row at this week’s Festival. The exceptional chaser looks bomb proof, but it will still be a fascinating race to watch with King George VI Chase winner Banbridge trying this distance for the first time in his career and one or two others in there capable of keeping the favourite honest.

Kopek Des Bordes, Majborough, Lossiemouth, The New Lion, Final Demand, Ballyburn, Jonbon and Teahupoo are just some of the other big names set to entertain us over the next four days in what is always a fantastic week of sport.

No doubt there will be the usual post mortems after the week when admission prices, accommodation prices and the cost of a pint of Guinness will all come in for flak with attendances almost certain to have dipped again.

There will also be close scrutiny of all the tweaks that have been made to the race programme this year.

The new rule regarding handicap hurdles, whereby a horse must have completed five races over hurdles prior to 24th February to qualify for Cheltenham, is already receiving criticism.

It was pointed out to me by Robbie Power in a pre-Festival chat last week that not all young horses can handle a schedule that involves racing five times by mid-February in order to qualify for a Cheltenham handicap hurdle.

The reason for this special rule at Cheltenham is to avoid a situation whereby a horse like Galopin Des Champs can arrive under the radar and make a mockery of the handicap system at the biggest meeting of the year, as the dual Gold Cup winner did at the Festival in 2021 when sluicing up in the Martin Pipe handicap hurdle off a rating of 142.

Aside from the Cheltenham Festival, a hurdler can normally gain a handicap rating after just three runs and if the horse wins a race it automatically qualifies for a rating. Perhaps a fairer system for Cheltenham would be to add in a clause that if a hurdler has won twice it can forgo the necessity to run five times.

If a horse has won two hurdle races the handicappers should be more than capable of making a pretty accurate assessment of its ability.

Another change to the Cheltenham race programme worth exploring is to extend the distance of the Mares Hurdle by a furlong or more. As it stands there is a difference of three and a half furlongs in distance between the Champion Hurdle and the Mares Hurdle which, as we have seen again this year, allows top class mares to hold options in both races and lets their connections leave their decisions about which race the mare runs in to the eleventh hour.

If the disparity in distance between the two races was greater it would automatically force the hand of connections of these high class mares to plan to run in one or the other race from a much earlier stage in the season and spare punters a lot of heartache.

Punting, of course, is what Cheltenham is all about for the vast majority of racing fans, myself included.

In the same way that jockeys, trainers, owners and stable staff get an extra kick out of a Cheltenham winner, so do us punters. There is nothing like backing a Cheltenham winner and it’s not solely about the money won. It’s also about your opinion being vindicated. You have watched these horses compete all season and you have spotted something others may have overlooked and when it clicks there is no better feeling, irrespective of how much money you staked.

You don’t have to bet like a blogger to enjoy Cheltenham.