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Cheltenham is relentless. It is a week that passes in a blur for those that are excited by such things, a blur of previews, odds forecasts, selections, going changes, pace analysis, trainer and jockey interviews, declarations, results, more analysis, winning, losing, celebrating, drowning sorrows and anticipation of the next race. The Saturday morning after the four days that have just preceded is a deflating realisation – this is the longest possible time before the next Cheltenham festival. Every year, usually in the immediate aftermath, we scratch our collective heads and wonder how we missed out on this winner, or how did we end up backing that other one instead? It is easy to get carried away in the rollercoaster of emotions during the week, so the purpose of this piece is to take a look in the cold light of day at what the winners at cheltenham 2015 had in common.
I looked at the 27 races at cheltenham 2015, for the purposes of the analysis though I left out the cross country race (it is a unique race, run on a different track, and as such should have its own separate trends). The only other race that left me with a bit of a conundrum from a statistical analysis point of view was the mares hurdle, in so far as Annie Power was the winner in all but the actual result when coming down at the last, and the eventual winner Glens Melody would have been no more than an honourable second, so in the interest of fairness I have left this race out too. That left 25 races to examine, broken down into 11 hurdles, 13 chases and a bumper. These could be further broken down into 8 handicaps and 17 non-handicaps.
One stat line that is trotted out every year is the importance of previous course form. Looking at the 25 winners from this year, 18 of them had indeed previously run at Cheltenham, either at a previous festival or at one of the other meetings throughout the year. The 7 outliers to this stat line are easily explained for the majority. Douvan, Un de Sceaux and Windsor Park were all Irish novices who were just far ahead of their rivals on the day in terms of pure ability, and a previous lack of course experience would not have been enough to stop them. Martello Tower was the other Irish horse to buck the trend, a dour stayer who was always going to be well suited to the hill. Of the others, Aux Ptits Soins (the Coral Cup winner) was having his first run outside of France, presumably thought too good by Paul Nicholls to risk ruining his handicap mark with a prep run. The Pertemps winner Call the Cops was another well handicapped horse, having had only two runs that season due to the cloud hanging over the stable of Nicky Henderson at the time. The final outlier was Qualando, another Paul Nicholls French import, who had run well in his two runs at Exeter, a track that places a good emphasis on stamina.
Perhaps more telling is that of those 18 that had run at the course prior to their 2015 festival wins, 14 had previously won or placed at Cheltenham. Given the relative competitiveness of races at the premier jump racing track in the world, this statistic is very significant. The four horses that buck the trend all have mitigating circumstances surrounding them too. Wicklow Brave and Killultagh Vic both won handicap hurdles at the 2015 festival, and while neither had won or placed at the track, they had both run very creditably in Grade One races at the 2014 festival (Wicklow Brave was in second place inside the final furlong in the Supreme Novices hurdle before weakening near the finish and Killultagh Vic was beaten just 5 lengths in the bumper behind Silver Concorde). The other two outliers were Cole Harden (World Hurdle) and Darna (handicap chase). Both had disappointed in previous runs at the course, but both had had an operation to improve their breathing in the time between their last runs and their respective 2015 festival wins.
The conclusions from this analysis are clear. The vast majority of winners at Cheltenham 2016 will have seen the course before, and will indeed have run well at the course before. Clearly the best starting point when trying to find a bet in every race is to look to such horses. The downside is that bookmakers are all too aware of this line, and previous Cheltenham winners are always some of the most examined horses when they go about pricing up these races. In order to try to catch the outliers to the trend though you need to treat each race like the plot of an Inspector Morse book, there is a complex narrative running through each one that prevents a hard and fast rule being applied, but with a careful look at the bigger picture for each horse (for example, first run post wind-op), certain betting angles can be identified. It would certainly be foolish to draw a blanket line through every horse that didn’t fit the criteria without examining the back story to each one. There is no substitute for hard graft unfortunately, but the rewards for finding the outliers are clear from the winning odds of the four horses above (33/1, 14/1, 25/1 and 7/1). Any one of those would be enough to change the betting picture for your week.
Another angle I decided to examine was the number of runs each winner at the 2015 festival had had prior to their victory. Festival races are the most competitive races of the season, the standard of jumping required, coupled with the necessity for a high cruising speed to hold a position mid race and the dour stamina required for the final climb up the punishing hill to the winning line means that winners at the festival invariably are running at an absolute peak. It goes without saying that a horse who has been trained to peak in October is unlikely to be at concert pitch in March. This is a very subjective stat line to be looking at though, with the main variables being the individual constitution of each horse (some horses can actually need regular races to bring them to peak fitness, while others respond better to being wrapped in cotton wool in the build up to a big race) and the methods of each trainer. Willie Mullins in particular appears to favour the ‘less is more’ approach with his top horses (Annie Power and Quevega have appeared successfully at the festival with no previous run at all that season). The most glaring statistic is that 20 of the 25 races I looked at were won by horses who had run a maximum of three times that season. Freshness appears to be a key factor in producing a top performance at Cheltenham, indeed 11 of the 20 had run just once or twice already that season. The outliers (all had four runs) all have mitigating circumstances too – Wicklow Brave was left at the start on his most recent start before his win, Uxizandre had unseated his jockey on his most recent run, and while The Druid’s Nephew and Martello Tower had both run four times prior to the festival, neither had run from the previous December, so both were coming in fresh. Cole Harden is the final outlier (as he was above), his first run since his wind operation providing some degree of explanation. Horses running in graded races at the festival tend to be sparingly campaigned anyway, so the three runs or less guide won’t really eliminate too many horses, but it is more useful in handicaps, where horses regularly show up having run plenty of times through the season.
Following on from the freshness theme is the date of each winners last run prior to the festival. There appears to be strong evidence for horses being at an advantage where the last run was on or before 31st January. 18 of the 25 winners of the races examined had not run in February or March prior to the festival. Of the outliers to this line Wicklow Brave and Uxizandre were explained above as not having hard races, and in the cases of Qualando, On the Fringe and Call the Cops, all were only having their second runs of the season. Coneygree and Windsor Park were the other horses who didn’t fit the stat, both ran in the first week in February. Modern training methods mean that all the big trainers in Britain and Ireland are more than capable of readying horses at home without the need for multiple runs to bring them to a peak. One effect of this from an Irish point of view is to lessen the importance of what was historically one of the most prestigious races in the Irish season, the Hennessy Gold Cup at Leopardstown in February. It is understandable that trainers of serious contenders for the Cheltenham Gold Cup would be reluctant to give their charges a potentially tough run so close to the festival, indeed you have to go back to 1996 (Imperial Call) to find the last winner of the Hennessy to follow up in Cheltenham only a month later. The flip side of this is the rise in competitiveness of the Lexus Chase (run at Leopardstown in December), as it gives horses more recovery time before the big one in March. Synchronised in recent years won the Lexus en route to Gold Cup glory, and more recently Bob’s Worth and Road to Riches have both run creditably in March following Lexus wins. Going forward, if the Lexus (run on a left handed, stamina-testing track) continues to attract Gold Cup calibre horses away from the King George (run on the flatter, right handed Kempton), it may well turn out to be the premier trial race for March.