February Blog - Cheltenham Festival Handicaps & Eurovision

1/2/24

With a terrific Trials Day at Cheltenham just passed and the Dublin Racing Festival to look forward to this weekend, things are really hotting up now in the build up to the Festival.

In the last three years 23 Irish-trained Cheltenham Festival winners ran at the Dublin Racing Festival. With regards to that two-day meeting for which I spun through all eight Grade 1 races in the Ante Post Focus column yesterday, I will split the Race Previews into two columns this weekend.

Willie Mullins has the favourites in seven of the eight Grade 1s so it’s not impossible that he could bag the lot as Gaelic Warrior has chances of turning over Marine Nationale in the Irish Arkle and he also has second and third-favourites galore over the two days.

Following Leopardstown I will upload my second of four instalments of the Cheltenham Festival Trends in the middle of next week. Already live are my trends for the ‘Big 5’ Championship races so I will next add the remaining Grade 1 races before nearer the time adding the handicaps and shoulder races.

My feeling at the moment is that we are going to have between 7-9 favourites that will start at under 2/1 at this season’s Festival so decisions will have to be made which horses are worth taking on, getting stuck into, or leaving them out of the equation altogether and looking to the ‘Without Favourite’ market for a better angle to bet on the race instead. On the latter point I’d say that’s looking likely for the Champion Hurdle, Mares’ Hurdle, Champion Chase and Triumph Hurdle at the time of writing.

The novice hurdles outside of the Triumph are more open than I recall for a long time with the Baring Bingham and Albert Bartlett looking particularly murky at present and the Supreme is shaping up to being a fascinating contest.

As for the novice chases, we’ll know an awful lot more after Leopardstown with regards to running plans for Willie Mullins but they too have the potential to be quite open if Gaelic Warrior can turn over Marine Nationale in the Irish Arkle and stay down the 2m route which would make both the Arkle and Turners more competitive rather than having two short-priced favourites for those contests and there is no standout for the National Hunt Chase unlike in recent years.

The nine Festival handicaps are soon to become more interesting to me than the Grade 1s for punting purposes which will have been exhausted in a couple of weeks’ time and I am looking forward to getting my head stuck into analysing those. I plan to attend the Festival Handicaps unveiling ceremony as usual which will be on February 28^th which can be informative with around a dozen trainers in attendance to take questions from the media and phone interviews with the big yards from Ireland.

Last season the Irish just edged the handicaps 5-4 but in a change from the norm they beat the Brits 3-1 in the handicap chases as it’s usually the handicap hurdles that they dominate and the home team take the honours in the handicap chases. Dan Skelton had something to say about that last season though by winning the Coral Cup (his Langer Dan is back down to the same handicap mark by the way) and then the County Hurdle (Faivoir) for the fourth time in eight years.

Also in a change from the norm in the handicaps last season, it was horses in the lower half of the handicap that fared best edging it 5-4. Over the previous decade I have been concentrating on horses in the top half of the Festival handicaps (actually, top third) as the class factor had been shining through and it was only the Skelton pair from the nine handicap winners last season that took advantage of having dropped down the ratings from its previous run. What’s he got falling down the official ratings for the handicap hurdles this year apart from Langer Dan again?

Whilst on the subject of Cheltenham Festival handicaps, it can’t go unmentioned that Willie Mullins has never won a handicap chase at the Festival. He’s had ten handicap hurdle successes amongst his 94 winners overall so how much longer can this last?

What price that he bursts through the 100 barrier this season? I’ll go 4/11. He’ll do so if he can match his haul of six winners last year, which might have been viewed as a slight disappointment having been responsible for ten winners in 2022 and seven in 2016, 2018 and 2020. He must have been mortified with just four winners in 2019. Could it be Galopin Des Champs that gives him his 100th Cheltenham Festival winner in the 100th Cheltenham Gold Cup? ITV Racing would be loving that as a narrative!

Now that we are into February, although still four weeks away it feels like spring is just around the corner and the four big events that I look forward to most in the spring after Cheltenham are Aintree, The Masters, the World Snooker Championship (all three are in the same week this year so that’s me jetting off to Spain to watch them) and Eurovision. Throw in Punchestown, the Classics on the Flat, the Players’ Championship and USPGA golf, and conclusion of the football season and from mid-March to mid-May is the time of the year that I look forward to most. Of course, this year we also have Euro 2024 and the Olympics so that can be extended to right throughout the summer.

In fact, today marks exactly 100 days to the Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Sweden, which will also signal the 50^th anniversary of Abba’s win with Waterloo so the launch has begun and the draw has already been made for the semi-finals. So far, just two songs have been officially released but throughout February they are going to be filtering through at regular intervals so I will be keeping on top of those in the weekly General Sports column.

February, on the other hand, is pretty damn dull after the Dublin Racing Festival with Newbury’s Trials Day not seeming to attract the big names anymore and it generally being quiet on the worldwide sporting front. We do have the Super Bowl if that’s your thing but other than that it is pretty mundane stuff from an overall point of view compared to the rest of the year. So, a good opportunity then to get stuck into listening to the Eurovision entries and trying to get ahead of the game by working out what might win the national finals in order to qualify.

One of those two confirmed songs so far is for Luxembourg who are back in the fold for the first time since 1995 so I’m expecting them to do quite well with the powers-that-be wanting them to do well. It’s also a pretty decent entry. When Italy returned after their long absence, their 125/1 entry finished second.

Ireland were also fast out of the traps and I reckon Bambie Thug (great name) will be only their second qualifier for the final since 2013. This isn’t an entry that will pass you by and will attract plenty of attention.