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With apologies for the creative ordering of Greg’s race previews, the Novice Hurdle at 1.20pm is coming up next …
I’ll post them closer to each race, too.
2.40pm: Juvenile Handicap Hurdle, 4yo, 2m 87yd
The first handicap at this year’s festival – promoted up the card after the Mares’ Hurdle moved to later in the week – is often the toughest nut to crack all week, as all bar one or two of the juveniles lining up will be making their handicap debut. That means, in turn – to no-one’s great surprise – that their trainers will have been doing all they can to show just enough form to get them into the race, but not so much that end up with too much weight. The mean price of the winners since the first running in 2005 has been 21-1, and while that is slightly skewed by the 80-1 victory of Jeff Kidder in 2021, there have also been two winners at 40-1, three at 33-1 and two at 25-1.
The last eight winners, meanwhile, have all been trained in Ireland, and the last two were saddled by Joseph O’Brien, who fields Glen To Glen and Dignam this time around. Saratoga, meanwhile, is the mount of JP McManus’s (soon-to-be-ex) No.1, Mark Walsh, and has a very similar profile to the same owner’s Brazil, successful in this race in 2022. Manlaga, the winner of the Victor Ludorum at Haydock last time, is another live contender in the same colours, while Ammes, from the burgeoning James Owen stable, is also worth considering carefully as his excellent trainer has kept him away from hurdles since a strong run at Wetherby in October. My eventual pick in an ultra-competitive heat, though, is Faye Bramley’s Winston Junior, who has been put away since finishing behind my fancy for the Triumph Hurdle, Minella Study, in a strong race at Cheltenham in December.
Selection: Winston Junior.
2pm: Arkle challenge trophy novice chase, grade one, 1m 7f 199yd
Greg Wood
Just six runners for the Arkle but it is still one of the more eagerly-anticipated head-to-heads of recent festivals as last year’s Supreme winner, Kopek Des Bordes, who has just one run over fences to his name, takes on the five-year-old Lulamba.
Britain/Ireland, Mullins/Henderson, potential v experience: it’s got all the elements you could want to see, plus a couple of live alternatives to the Big Two if you are so inclined, in Kargese and Steel Ally. Timeform has Lulamba on top of the pile, though only by 4lb from the mare Kargese once her 7lb allowance is taken into account. This race has been won off the back of a single chase start in the past, by Well Chief in 2004 and Western Warhorse in 2014, but it is a big ask, even if Kopek Des Bordes has been given some intensive schooling alongside some of Willie Mullins’s better chasers. Lulamba, meanwhile, was not entirely convincing in the middle part of his last race, which left me wondering whether Steel Ally might have crept in slightly under the radar after an impressive success in a well-run renewal of the Kingmaker at Warwick. At around 14-1, it doesn’t cost much to find out.
Key form:
Beginners’ Chase, Navan, 17 Nov 25, 2m 1f (Kopek Des Bordes)
G1 Henry VIII Novice Chase, Sandown, 6 Dec 25, 1m 7f 99yd (Lulamba)
G1 Irish Arkle Novice Chase, Leopardstown 2 Feb 26, 2m 1f (Kargese)
G2 Kingmaker Novice Chase, Warwick, 7 Feb 26, 2m 54yd (Steel Ally)
Timeform Top-Rated: Lulamba.
Selection: Steel Ally.
If you have any thoughts on the day ahead at Cheltenham, or want to explain how horse racing works to me, please do send me an email?
In the meantime, let’s press on with Greg’s excellent race previews …
Greg Wood
In the long-forgotten time, about 30 years or so ago, when the Cheltenham festival was a three-day get‑together for country types, no one gave much thought to attendance figures, the price of beer or maximising the customer experience. It was a coming together of the National Hunt clans, much anticipated and hugely enjoyed but not, in the grand scheme, an event with a story to tell about the overall health of the sport.
But not any more. The state of the Cheltenham festival is a key indicator of the state of the racing nation as a whole, and perhaps more so than ever this year, as the sport heads to Gloucestershire rudderless after Charles Allen, who took over as chair of the British Horseracing Authority just six months ago, turned out to be a temporary hire. There is even talk of a schism in the dysfunctional racing family as the showpiece tracks, and that includes Cheltenham, demand change “to ensure that significant views from key racecourses can influence outcomes”.
Greg Wood
It may be a case of the heart ruling the head, but a horse I’ll be having a small each-way bet on in the opening Supreme Novice Hurdle is Barry Connell’s Eachtotheirown, who will be the trainer’s only runner at the meeting following the bitterly disappointing news last week that Marine Nationale had been scratched from his defence of the Champion Chase crown due to a minor injury.
Connell himself is fascinating and engaging character – a former stockbroker and hedge fund manager who learned to ride in his late 30s and rode several winners, including one here at Cheltenham, as an amateur in his 40s. He then moved into ownership and eventually into training his horses himself, in a yard built from scratch to his own design.
Connell never sends a horse to the festival for the sake of it, and his record at the meeting from just five runners is two wins – the other was Marine Nationale’s success in the Supreme three years ago - plus a second, a fourth and only one runner out of the frame.
Connell spoke in glowing terms about Eachtotheirown during a media event at his yard last month.
“He won his maiden hurdle in Galway and then we thought he was a certainty in the [Grade One] Royal Bond,” Connell said, “but in November we just seemed to have three or four weeks when the horses weren’t running well and he ran a shocker.
“Never one to waste a good crisis, I applied for a handicap mark for him and was given a rating of 124. We went to Thurles and he won by nine lengths and went up 13lb to 137.
“I think he is definitely capable of running to a mark significantly higher than that. He had to make his own running in his maiden hurdle and in the handicap. I think a truly run championship race where you can drop him in will suit him and he’s a super jumper. He’ll be a big price for the Supreme, but I definitely think he’ll be competitive.”
For anyone who is interested, there is 50-1 available about Eachtotheirown, including with bookmakers offering a quarter the odds and three places each-way.
Donald McRae
Sean Bowen can claim to be the best jockey in jumps racing by some distance. Next month he will be confirmed as champion jockey for the second successive year as, on 210 victories so far, he is 107 ahead of Harry Skelton, his closest rival. Bowen is already looking ahead to next season, where he harbours serious ambitions of becoming the first jump jockey to ride 300 winners in a single campaign. These are staggering numbers that stand in stark contrast to his miserable record at the Cheltenham festival.
The Welshman smiles more than any other jockey I’ve met – for he operates in a gruelling trade full of hard and often taciturn men who are all fated to lose far more often than they win. But Bowen has a remarkably phlegmatic outlook that means he grins when I read out his meagre statistics from the Cheltenham festival. Apart from not having a winner in 52 rides, the average starting price of those horses was 40-1.
Courtesy of Oddschecker, here are today’s three top market movers:
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Kurasso Blue (Challenge Cup) 5/1 from 10/1
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Sober Glory (Supreme) 7/1 from 11/1
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Manlaga (Juvenile Handicap) 9/2 from 7/1
Plus! The top three most backed horses today.
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Old Park Star – 34% of Supreme bets
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Kopek Des Bordes – 40% of Arkle bets (Lulamba 35%)
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Lossiemouth – 34% of Champion Hurdle bets
Leader D’Allier is a non-runner in the first race, the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, scheduled for 1.20pm.
Luke McLaughlin
Morning everyone, and thank you Greg for that comprehensive introduction. Exciting times.
Let’s take a look at the day one preview, written by none other than Greg Wood:
Preamble
Greg Wood
Top of the morning from Cheltenham racecourse on day one of the 2026 festival. Oh, the places we’ll go over the next four afternoons, as the National Hunt season reaches a crescendo with 13 Grade One races, 13 handicaps with a depth of competitiveness that all but defies rational analysis, and a couple of Grade Twos that are a chance to take a breath.
This is a day that never loses its giddy, stomach-churning excitement, and I say that from experience as someone who has not missed an opening day at Cheltenham since my first in 1990, when Kribensis and Richard Dunwoody won the Champion Hurdle at the memorable odds of 95-40. The running order has changed down the years (along with the number of races and days at the meeting), but the tingle as the field walks toward the tape before the Supreme Novice Hurdle is, for me, up there with the finest moments in all of sport.
On the track, there are serious hopes that British stables will stage a revival after a decade of annual pummelling at the hands of the Irish. It did not occur to me at the time, but for what it is, or more probably is not, worth, I put up six British-trained horses and only one from Ireland in the tips for the opening day. The result that might get racing onto the front pages, meanwhile, would be a win for Harry Redknapp’s The Jukebox Man in Friday’s Gold Cup.
Off the track, meanwhile, the daily attendance figures will be closely studied for evidence that Cheltenham’s extensive range of schemes and innovations to tempt customers back to the track have started to have some effect. The festival is the biggest meeting of the year bar none, and four straight years of falling attendance would be bitterly disappointing not just for the track, but the sport as a whole.
One key indicator that seems sure to be up (or, if you are being pedantic, down) is the number of odds-on shots over the week, a sign of the depth of competition overall. There have been seven odds-on chances in each of the last two seasons, but there are only four in the current lists and that can only be a positive for the betting turnover.
There is certainly no lack of competition in today’s seven races, which include three handicap chases and the Fred Winter Handicap Hurdle, frequently the most impenetrably tricky event of the week. Race-by-race previews will be here throughout the afternoon, along with all the news, views, results, betting and gambles, as the 2026 Cheltenham festival finally gets under way.
