DEFI DU SEUIL CAN MAINTAIN MY RECORD

Graham Buddry looks back on last year’s Cheltenham to make his predictions for this one

- Graham Buddry

To say the 2019 Cheltenham Festival was bizarre, topsyturvy, chaotic yet wonderful would still not be doing it justice.

There seemed three certainties in that Gordon Elliott and Willie Mullins would train hatfuls of winners and Davy Russell would partner at least one into the winner’s enclosure.

In reality Willie Mullins won the first two races then had 31 beaten horses before the awful Mares, Novice Hurdle, two full days later which he won with a 50/1 shot from his seven runners! Then between that winner and a horse even he thought of as his least chance of winning the Gold Cup he ran up another 16 losers before Al Boum Photo finished off with another five of his all failing to make the frame.

I think it fair to say that Gordon Elliott was badly out of form at Cheltenham, too, drawing an unaccustomed blank on day one. Apart from the brilliant Tiger Roll in the Cross Country and the impressive Envoi Allen in the Bumper, he scored in just one handicap with 42 losers, including favourites and other well-fancied types.

Davy Russell, with at least one winner every year since 2006, came home empty-handed while on the training front Nigel Twiston-Davies, Colin Tizzard, Gordon McCain, David Pipe, Alan King, and Jonjo O’Neill couldn’t muster a single winner between them. A closer look reveals that O’Neill, McCain, and Pipe fielded just nine runners between them. With all of this, “bizarre” barely comes close.

Perhaps the strangest thing of the first day was the Champion Hurdle. Billed almost exclusively as a three-horse race between Buveur D’Air, Apples Jade and Laurina, what price could you have gotten on none of them making the first three home?!

To top it, the winner was a five-year-old. The last from that age group to win was Katchit 21 years earlier and he never won another race, yet Espoir D’Allen won by a record-breaking margin, smashing Istabraq’s previous record.