Cheltenham Festival 2025: three things we will learn on Thursday
REDIRECTED: Galileo Dame had been bound for the Triumph Hurdle throughout the winter but will now race in the Mares Novices' Hurdle on Thursday, what looks like a far more winnable race. Pic: Healy Racing
The tenth running of the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle is staged today, one of the newer additions to Festival week which was inserted into the programme as an inconsequential ‘filler’ to justify a four-day meeting. Or so it seemed until Tuesday when last year’s winner Golden Ace won the Champion Hurdle and the runner-up in 2024, Brighterdaysahead, started second favourite.
It’s difficult to see any of today’s field reaching those dizzy heights next season, even with the Ace’s golden luck. But it is still an interesting and multi-layered contest to kick off this afternoon’s proceedings.
Previous trends when assessing races can be important and if the first 10 years tell a tale, then the winner will be aged five or six, Irish-trained and unbeaten this season and she will have won a graded race over further than two miles.
Willie Mullins trained the first five winners but hasn’t done so since Concertista triumphed in 2020 and saddles just the seven runners today in an attempt to rediscover his lost momentum.
The great Faugheen’s young relative, Maughreen has drifted significantly in the betting in recent days having been ante-post favourite through the spring.
She has been supplanted by Gavin Cromwell’s Sixandahalf, who despite her name is aged only five. Unlike Maughreen who comes from stout National Hunt stock, Sixandahalf is Flat-bred and won at Newmarket and was third in the Irish Cesarewitch before switching to hurdles where she won her only start impressively at Fairyhouse in January.
Another Flat-bred contender has been switched recently too. Galileo Dame’s long-term target through the winter was the white-hot Triumph Hurdle and she has been rerouted to what looks like a much more winnable race. Lossiemouth proved on Tuesday that a late change of plan can be a fine idea, and Galileo Dame might prove it again today.
Maughreen is owned by the very eclectic Closutton Racing Club and an estimated 80 people from the group have travelled to the track with dreams of memorable victory and a less memorable night out afterwards. This addition to the crowd size is good news for the course executive which has suffered again from decreasing attendances with the opening day on Tuesday down about 8% on last year’s equivalent figure but bad news for the gate keepers who valiantly guard entrance to the sanctity of the winner’s enclosure.
Hopefully good order will have been restored by the start of the second race, the newly tilted Jack Richards Novices Handicap Chase — aka the Turners. Downgraded this year from a Grade One contest it has attracted a maximum field of 20 runners, so the strategy has seemed to work, especially considering the fine spectacle that was the Brown Advisory Chase yesterday with the best staying novices all turning up to run.
Springwell Bay, who had entries in half a dozen races this week has been sent here and carries top-weight of 11-12 which means that he is conceding 8lbs to Caldwell Potter. When Caldwell changed hands for over €700,000 at a dispersal sale last year, his new owners, who include Alex Ferguson, might not have expected that his Festival challenge would come in a handicap chase.
A Grade One-winning hurdler when he was with Gordon Elliott, he won a novice chase on his on his debut at Carlisle in December but has disappointed twice since. The chances are that when he gets his ducks in a row and recovers his Irish form, he will turn out to be a much better animal than Springwell Bay and he would be a welcome change of luck for Paul Nicholls whose dominance at this meeting is slowly becoming a distant memory.
Returning to the importance of trends in picking the winners of horse races, this one might be the most remarkable of all at Cheltenham this week. The last 11 winners of the Ryanair Chase have all been bred in France. It’s a trend that is likely to continue this afternoon with six of the nine starters all carrying Gallic blood and if numerical proof is needed, the bookies’ odds on the race indicate that the trend is 88% likely to continue.
The big three, Fact To File, Protekorat, and Il Est Français are all French. Protekorat won the race last year for Dan Skelton and returns to defend his title in good order having won his prep at Wincanton in January. But now a 10-year-old, it’s likely that some of the younger guns might be a bit lively for him.
Fact To File was expected to be challenging for the Gold Cup this week following his imperious novice season but two long looks from afar at the rear end of Galopin Des Champs powering away from him at Leopardstown made it an easy decision for his connections to bring him down in trip for the Ryanair. Another coming down in distance is exuberant front-runner Il Est Francais, who, as his name makes clear, is French too.
He ran the whole field ragged in the King George at Kempton at Christmas, apart from Banbridge who caught him after the last fence. As with Fact To File the decision to come down in trip almost made itself and if he handles the undulations of Cheltenham as well as he did the flat track at Kempton, he may prove to be uncatchable.
