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The venerable Timeform organisation used a well-chosen four-letter word to describe Constitution Hill’s performance in the Boodles Champion Hurdle at Punchestown in early May, when the top-rated hurdler of recent decades started as the odds-on favourite but finished fifth of the six runners. It was, the firm’s post-race analysis said, a “disconcertingly tame display”.
Tame. Ouch. It is not a word that could ever have been applied to the first dozen races of Constitution Hill’s career, which ranged from the electrifying, effortless brilliance of his first two seasons to the high drama of falls at Cheltenham and Aintree this year.
At Punchestown he travelled well enough to three out, but when Nico de Boinville shook the reins Constitution Hill had nothing more to give. He eventually trailed home 27 lengths behind the winner, beaten when completing for the first time in his career.
The greatest racehorses, by definition, have further to fall when they pass their peak, but few have ever slipped as far or as fast as Constitution Hill in the seven and a half weeks between the Cheltenham festival and Punchestown. He lined up for the Champion Hurdle on 11 March as the unbeaten winner of 10 races, including eight at Grade One level. By 2 May , as he trailed home all of 27 lengths behind State Man in Ireland, he was a listless shadow of his former self.
It remains a troubling image before Constitution Hill’s return to action in the Fighting Fifth Hurdle at Newcastle on Saturday, but an essential part of the narrative too before what promises to be the best hurdle race this side of Cheltenham 2026.
The deposed champion on the comeback trail is up against not one, but two young pretenders in Dan Skelton’s The New Lion, an impressive winner at Cheltenham in March, and the unbeaten Anzadam, from Willie Mullins’s powerhouse stable in Ireland. The winner, almost certainly, will set off as favourite for the Champion Hurdle itself in the spring.
And if that winner turns out to be Constitution Hill, the stage will be set for one of the great festival showpieces next year, as Nicky Henderson, a trainer with plenty of previous when it comes to coaxing champions back to the summit, attempts to do for Constitution Hill what he did for Sprinter Sacre a decade ago.
That horse, like Constitution Hill, had compiled an unbeaten 10-race before he was pulled up with an irregular heartbeat in the Desert Orchid Chase at Kempton in December 2013. He was off the track for more than a year, and then beaten in all three starts in the 2014-15 season, but went unbeaten in four in 2015-16 including a memorable second success in the Champion Chase in March.
A similar story arc for Constitution Hill would arguably be an even greater achievement for a trainer who has shown plenty of resilience himself over the course of nearly 50 years in the game. Henderson won his second National Hunt trainers’ title in 1987, the same year in which he nursed the talented but fragile See You Then to his third Champion Hurdle victory. His third championship, after a quarter of a century of dominance by Martin Pipe and then Paul Nicholls, did not arrive for another 26 years.
So the script for a glorious final season to Constitution Hill’s career writes itself. It is just waiting for its star to take centre stage at Newcastle on Saturday, and prove that he still has what it takes.
