World politics is dire but so long as Mick Herron is writing spy novels, David Mitchell is raising laughs and Bukayo Saka is scoring goals there is joy available and I have lived to see the start of another proper jumps season at the Cheltenham Showcase meeting. Saturday’s racing did, however, provide a sharp reminder of how the Irish dominated last season’s Cheltenham Festival, winning 18 of the 27 races, including 12 of the 14 Grade One contests. Irish trainers Ian Patrick Donoghue, John McConnell, Gordon Elliott and Henry de Bromhead won four out of the seven races, and you have to wonder how hard some home-based handlers are trying when only one of the five runners in the William Hill novices hurdle came from an English yard. Even the ever-combative Paul Nicholls, 14 times our champion trainer, didn’t have a single runner on the card.
Allowing professionals into the National Hunt Chase will make it just another novice handicap chase
One positive for home fans was the victory for his nephew Harry Derham’s Givemefive in the Masterson Holdings Hurdle, his first at Cheltenham. Harry made good use of his six years as assistant to uncle Paul and started training on his own in 2022. Last year, at 25 per cent, he had the highest strike rate of winners to runners of any British jumps trainer. After Givemefive had scooted past Dodger Long and the odds-on Irish-trained favourite Bottler’secret he confirmed a neat piece of race-targeting: ‘We brought him in two weeks early from his summer break with just this race in mind. He was found by my cousin Megan and has been a fabulous little horse.’
The Showcase Meeting was a first chance to discuss with jumping aficionados the slate of changes being made to the future Festival programme, including the Turner Novices Chase losing its Grade One status and becoming a handicap as will the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase. Most seem ready to live with those changes but plenty seem to agree with me that allowing professional jockeys, as well as amateurs, to ride in the 3m 6f National Hunt Chase marathon is a sad move, especially since it was announced without any consultation with the Amateur Jockeys Association. My worry about officialdom’s constant tinkering with the race programme is that too much attention is paid to framing contests the bookmakers want to increase betting volumes on, and too much is done for ‘image’ reasons to help quieten the voices of those who will never go racing and would like to see the sport shut down altogether. Some changes to the Grand National – such as softening the cores of fences, moving the start further from the crowds and stiffening the qualifications for those allowed to run – have improved horse and rider safety. But reducing the maximum number of runners from 40 to 34 has produced a sanitised Grand National lite. We seem to have forgotten all about the history, tradition and ethos which help to give character to races and I fear that allowing professionals into the National Hunt Chase, a Festival ingredient since 1911, will make it just another novice handicap chase.
Many happy memories are centred around the National Hunt Chase. Along with the Kim Muir and the Hunters’ Chase, it has been an excellent chance for leading amateurs to display their talents and in many cases to help tune them up into turning pro. Mouse Morris won the race for Edward O’Grady on Mr Midland the week before he did so and Jamie Osborne was second in it just before taking the same step. Looking back through its past participants you see every corner of racing represented. Regular contestants included the great John Lawrence, later Lord Oaksey, John Thorne and Marcus Armytage, who won the National on Mr Frisk. There were future Grand National-winning trainers like Nick Gaselee, Oliver Sherwood and Nigel Twiston-Davies, as well as leading figures from the Flat like James Fanshawe and Ian Balding, who won the race in 1963 as a Cambridge undergraduate on Willie Stephenson’s Time. Stephenson’s winners rarely went unbacked and soon after the race he handed the surprised winning rider an envelope which turned out to contain £300. Michael Dickinson, who went on to be a leading jockey and the trainer who trained the first five horses home in the Gold Cup, won it as a 17-year-old in 1968. In 2010, Katie Walsh became the first female winner, beating her future sister-in-law Nina Carberry, and I haven’t forgotten Willie Mullins, Mr Cheltenham himself, telling me of the scare he had before winning the National Hunt Chase on Hazy Dawn in 1982. Turning for home, he said: ‘I got the fright of my life because I couldn’t see any fence. I thought “Cripes. Am I after taking the wrong course?”. This whole thing went through my mind. I think it was the way that the sun was shining off the stand or a shadow blocked my eyesight. It was probably three seconds but it felt like ten minutes.’ Luckily the fence reappeared just in time for Willie but I fear that handing over the National Hunt Chase to the pros risks taking away substantial chunks of future racing history.
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