With the Cheltenham Festival now less than a month away, the United Kingdom and Ireland’s top trainers, jockeys and horses are primed and ready for the prestigious four-day meeting at Prestbury Park. The Festival has been dominated by those who make their way across the Irish Sea to the Cotswolds in recent years — with the hosts left downright embarrassed during the 2021 behind closed doors renewal, as the Irish won the Prestbury Cup by a damning 23 victories to five!
It is certainly a concerning state of affairs for British racing. To be so badly beaten at arguably the biggest meeting in the National Hunt calendar would have been a bitter pill to swallow for the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) and the likes of Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls, the latter firing an extremely rare blank at last year’s Festival, who both used to rule the race for the sought-after Leading Trainer award for over a decade.
However, the Irish have really taken control of the reins over the course of the last 10 years — largely due to the immense work of Willie Mullins, of course. The Co. Carlow-based handler has a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of talent at his Closutton yard and as a result has taken home the Leading Trainer accolade eight times since 2011, with his Irish counterpart the only man to topple the 73-time Cheltenham winner — as he won the award consecutively in 2017 and 2018.
Worryingly for the top British trainers though, the tight Irish grip on the Cheltenham Festival doesn’t look like ending any time soon. Henry de Bromhead burst on to the scene brilliantly last year, and while he couldn’t dethrone Mullins and take home the Leading Trainer award as he was edged out on placings after they both picked up six victories apiece, he did land an incredibly rare triple crown — winning the Champion Chase, Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup.
With Elliott back from his racing ban and in fine form so far this season, with several major victories to reinstate his position as one of the best handlers in the sport, the Irish have three serious contenders for the Leading Trainer award this year, and looking at the race odds for the big contests across the week, it looks set to be another commanding victory for those from the Emerald Isles in the Prestbury Cup — with another thrashing set to be on the cards.
In many ways, it feels like the British are just letting the Irish run away with each and every year now though. There were calls from pundits and punters for something to change when Ireland won the Prestbury Park by seven victories (17-10) in 2020, but nothing was done and the hosts were ultimately punished with their biggest wake-up call yet when they were left to pick up the scraps with just five victories last year — none of which came in the five Championship races, making it all the more concerning!
In fact, the Arkle Challenge Trophy and the Marsh Novices’ Chase were the only of Cheltenham’s 14 Grade 1 races that the Irish didn’t win and the British could perhaps thank the heavy odds-on favourite Envoi Allen for his shock fall in the latter — which allowed Henderson’s Chantry House to win a race that has been so heavily dominated by the Irish since it’s inauguration in 2011. It was actually another Henderson horse, Shishkin, who won the Arkle and helped ease the humiliation a tad.
It was a truly amazing strike-rate for the visitors, winning 82% of the Festival’s 28 races despite the fact they only fielded a mere 40% of the runners over the course of the four days. Had you have told jumps racing fans 10 or 15 years ago that the pendulum was going to swing in Ireland’s favour at all, they would have laughed in your face then let alone telling them just how controlling over the meeting they would really become. After all, they were lucky to have a winner at all as recent as the 1980s or 1990s.
‘How has this been allowed to happen?’ and ‘what are we going to do fix this?’ are just a couple of the questions often asked of the BHA over the last couple of years. Yet, almost 12 months on from that humiliating defeat, which really should have been the rude awakening British racing needed, it seems like nothing has been done to solve these issues and to be quite frank, the hosts are staring down the barrel of another embarrassing loss this year — with Irish runners leading most of the markets, sometimes in their twos and threes.
But more should be done because if the Irish are allowed to keep dominating the Festival then there will soon be serious repercussions for British racing. Firstly, why would owners want to keep (or even put) their horses in British stables when they would clearly be better off over in Ireland? At the minute it seems they are paying large sums of money season-after-season just for their prized assets to be left in the wake of an Irish entry in the big races at Cheltenham.
Not only that, the British jumps season is often undermined by that on the other side of the Irish Sea. Until Cheltenham, the top Irish horses will very rarely make the trip across to the mainland as the quality and the prize money at home is just leaps and bounds ahead of that in Britain. That was evident towards the end of last season when a wealth of Ireland’s winners at Prestbury Park stayed put for the Punchestown Festival instead of heading to Merseyside for the Grand National Festival.
It feels like Nicholls has already planned to cut his losses this year, with the likes of Frodon and Clan Des Obeaux bypassing the Festival, and that’s even more worrying for British racing that their top trainers are starting to think like that. The pendulum can swing back, but something will need to change drastically, and the BHA will need to put a plan together soon, if that is to be the case!
