Before and after
Just walked around @CheltenhamRaces this is a before and the next shot will be after to show the job the team are doing here pic.twitter.com/58pIt202Nj
— mick fitzgerald (@mickfitzg) March 14, 2018
This is the after. It is still going to ride soft pic.twitter.com/IHOK9lChad
— mick fitzgerald (@mickfitzg) March 14, 2018
Presumably, this was a concern over making the ground worse, not photographers getting trapped in quicksand. The going today is still soft, heavy in places, after being downgraded yesterday afternoon.
Cheltenham was so worried about the saturated ground yesterday, they told photographers not to cross the course to take pics from the inside
— chris cook (@claimsfive) March 14, 2018
Updated
A change of headgear or a minor procedure to their breathing apparatus can make a big difference to a horse, or can at least indicate a determined effort by the trainer to elicit improvement. Here’s today’s list of horses that might take a step forward on their known form. Of course, there will be other reasons not yet in the public domain and it will be lovely to hear about those from trainers who make it to the winner’s enclosure...
2.10 Full Irish - cheekpieces worn for the first time
2.50 William Henry - cheekpieces worn for the first time
Royal Vacation - wind operation since last run
3.30 Ar Mad - cheekpieces worn for the first time
4.50 Brave Dancing - tongue tie worn for the first time
Eureu Du Boulay - tongue tie worn for the first time
5.30 Felix Desjy - hood worn for the first time
It might be worth noting that all 16 runners yesterday who wore tongue ties were beaten. It would make sense that horses with breathing issues, indicated by a tongue tie, might find it especially tough going on very deep ground. Presenting Percy and Cause Of Causes are tongue-tied runners due to start favourite on Wednesday and it’ll be interesting to see how they fare.
Updated
Top jockeys after Day One
Ruby Walsh 2 wins
Noel Fehily, Barry Geraghty, Brian Hughes, Lizzie Kelly, Patrick Mullins 1
Walsh could be on his way to being top jockey at the Festival for the 12th time. He’s now on 58 career wins at this meeting, well ahead of the next man (Geraghty on 35). He had a bit of trouble settling Getabird in the opener yesterday but otherwise there wasn’t much of a clue that he’d been off injured for four months until last week. Lizzie Kelly was the only jockey to break their Festival duck yesterday, her celebrations making it patently clear what a relief this was for her after a frustrating time of it last March.
Top jockey betting: 1-3 Ruby Walsh 13-2 Barry Geraghty 12-1 Jack Kennedy 16-1 Noel Fehily 20-1 Nico De Boinville
Top trainers after Day One
Willie Mullins 3 wins
Nicky Henderson, Tom George, Mick Channon, Nick Williams 1 win
Day one a year ago felt like a changing of the guard, with Mullins getting blanked for the first time in nine years while Gordon Elliott had a treble. The old order re-established itself yesterday, with Mullins taking his Festival tally to 57 and Henderson (now on 59) having to work hard to stay ahead of him.
Meanwhile, Elliott had one of the toughest days ever endured by a trainer here. He ran seven, including two favourites, but couldn’t get closer than third. Alas, he lost Mossback, who sustained a fatal injury in the National Hunt Chase. Channon was breaking his Festival duck at the age of 69. Williams broke his duck just last year but has now won at consecutive Festivals.
Top trainer betting: 1-7 Willie Mullins 7-1 Nicky Henderson 14-1 Gordon Elliott
Morning all. Day two has dawned at Cheltenham, with the hotly anticipated Champion Chase the highlight of another packed day of racing. We’ll have all the previews, betting and buildup right here, but first, a quick round up of the news from a cracker of an opening day.
Buveur D’Air landed the Champion Hurdle, but only after holding off a late charge from Melon to avoid a major upset:
Lizzie Kelly bounced back from the disappointment of last year’s Gold Cup to land her first Cheltenham win on Coo Star Sivola:
Those two favourites, and plenty more short-priced runners, made it a great opening day for punters. Not so much for the bookies:
1.30 Ballymore Novice Hurdle Vision Des Flos 16-1
2.10 RSA Chase Presenting Percy 11-4
2.50 Coral Cup The Organist 25-1
3.30 Queen Mother Champion Chase Min 4-1
4.10 Cross-country Chase Cause Of Causes 3-1
4.50 Fred Winter Handicap Hurdle Eragon De Chanay 12-1
5.30 Champion Bumper Carefully Selected 10-1
If I’m right about these results (no sniggering at the back), Willie Mullins will have matched Nicky Henderson’s tally of 59 Festival successes by the end of the day. Together with Pat Kelly’s Presenting Percy and Gordon Elliott’s Cause Of Causes, that would be four winners for Ireland on the card. Vision Des Flos would be just a second Festival success for Colin Tizzard since 2013. You can read my in-depth analysis here.
The Betfair Cheltenham Festival tipping competition
Congratulations to oldpunter, who had six of yesterday’s seven winners and won our tipping competition on a final score of +25.50. Dobdobdob did best of the rest on +18.17. Oldpunter, we’ll be in touch by email to arrange your prize.
You could win a £100 account credit from Betfair by proving your tipping prowess on today’s races. All you have to do is give us your selections for all of today’s races at Cheltenham. As ever, our champion will be the tipster who returns the best profit to notional stakes of £1 at starting price on each tip. Non-runners count as losers.
Please post all your tips in a single posting, using the comment facility below, before the first race at 1.30pm.
There are seven races at Cheltenham today and you must post a single selection for each race. Our usual terms and conditions, which you can read here, will apply, except that this will be a strictly one-day thing. If we get a tie after all the races have been run, the winner will be the one who posted their tips earliest out of those with the highest score. If an entrant has to repost their selections because of a non-runner, we will use the time of their later posting for tiebreak purposes.
If you don’t win today, don’t despair. We are running an identical competition on each day of the Festival.
Updated
Preamble
Bookmakers first started to price up a head-to-head between Altior and Douvan in this afternoon’s Queen Mother Champion Chase 366 days ago, when Nicky Henderson’s chaser extended his unbeaten record over fences with an easy win in the Arkle Trophy.
For 24 hours, Douvan was odds-on to win later this afternoon, but then he surrendered his own unbeaten record in last season’s Champion Chase and suffered an injury in the process. The odds for today’s race then shifted to 2-1 about Altior and 3-1 for Douvan, and 12 months later, after no end of concern and speculation that one or both would not make it to the race, the prices have scarcely shifted at all.
Altior, admittedly, would be an odds-on chance today had it not been for a last-minute injury scare earlier in the week, when he was found to be lame on Monday morning. That has, seemingly, been put to bed thanks to the sterling work of Henderson’s farrier and vet, but the punters still seem to be a little wary of Altior, despite having seen him coast to success in his prep race at Newbury last month.
The last confirmed sighting of Douvan, on the other hand, was his failure at last year’s Festival, so his relative strength in the market is interesting. Does it suggest genuine confidence in Ireland that he will produce his brilliant best today? Or does it reflect the uncertainty after Altior’s recent scare, with half an eye too on Douvan’s stable companion, Min, who did nothing wrong in his own trial for today’s race in Ireland.
My guess is that money will arrive for Altior before the off while Douvan will drift, but that could prove to be a long way wide of the mark. It has all the makings of a Festival classic, including the very real possibility that an outsider will upstage the headline acts.
Samcro, who runs in the opening Ballymore Novice Hurdle, is the other key name on today’s card, and one of only two horses over the final three days of the meeting that is expected to start at odds-on. Defeat for a horse already being talked about as a potential great would be a bitter blow for the punters, and also for Gordon Elliott, Samcro’s trainer, who drew a blank on Tuesday and has been shunted out to 14-1 to defend his title as the Festival’s leading trainer.
Willie Mullins went through the first two days without a winner last time around, however, and still managed to finish the meeting with half a dozen. In addition to Douvan and Min, he has four in the Ballymore, including Next Destination, the second-favourite, five runners in the Coral Cup – where Bleu Berry looks interesting at around 25-1 – and five more in the Bumper. If he has two more winners than Nicky Henderson today, they will be tied at the top of the Festival’s all-time list.
Cheltenham 1.30 Vision Des Flos 2.10 Presenting Percy 2.50 The Organist (nap) 3.30 Min 4.10 Cause Of Causes 4.50 Eragon De Chanay (nb) 5.30 Carefully Selected
Southwell 1.20 Warrior's Valley 1.55 Cherubic 2.35 The Jungle VIP 3.15 Volatile 3.55 Captain Lars 4.35 The Resdev Way 5.15 Coiste Bodhar
Huntingdon 1.45 Lungarno Palace 2.25 Skint 3.05 Versifier 3.45 Bisoubisou 4.25 Alberto's Dream 5.05 Oakley Hall 5.40 Sam I
Wolverhampton 5.45 Bernie's Boy 6.15 King Kevin 6.45 Seasearch 7.15 Bowditch 7.45 Get Even 8.15 Spring Romance 8.45 Surrey Blaze
The going here remains soft, heavy in places, having swapped around from heavy, soft in places midway through Tuesday’s card, while the going on the Cross Country course, which stages its sole race of the meeting later on, is also soft, heavy in places.
“It was dry overnight and quite breezy and the going has dried a little more,” Simon Claisse, the clerk of the course, said this morning. “There is still a little bit of heavy ground on what we call the stud bends, so that only affects races over two-and-a-half miles. What I would describe as the round course is soft all over.
“I expect a dry and breezy day with temperatures of 11 or 12 degrees. It may well be that by 1.30pm when we kick off with the first race that we change the going to soft all round, but we will just have to see how things dry out over the next few hours.”
