On Course Profits – The Cheltenham Festival 2026

The 2026 Cheltenham Festival gets underway on Tuesday 10^th March and ends on Gold Cup day on Friday 13^th March.

In last year’s edition we suggested some snippets/traits which were intended to provide a potential shortcut to finding the winner of a good chunk of the 28 races.

Overall, the snippets found the winner in 9 of the races but overall, blindly backing the qualifiers would have led to a small loss of 4.2pts at the returned Betfair SP.

There were some notable successes though which may be worth following again this time around.

2026 Snippets Shortlist

Day 1 – Tues 10^th March 

2.40pm Ultima Handicap Chase

With one exception the last 10 renewals have been won by a horse that finished in the top 6 last time out. Corach Rambler had unseated his jockey prior to winning the race in 2022 and proved that was an anomaly by following up in 2023 before going onto to win the Grand

National a few weeks later.

To be fair that initial stat would have covered the majority of runners, but it may help knock a few out of this year’s renewal.

Vintage Clouds at 28/1 in 2021 is also an outlier as all the other 9 recent winners went off with an SP of between 9/2 and 12/1 and blindly following that section of the betting would have returned a 25% ROI.

Using the above in the 2025 renewal would have led us to finding both the winner, Myretown (13/2, 8.44 BFSP) and the second, The Changing Man.

4.40 Fred Winter Juvenile

The most recent decade of winners has gone off between 7/2 and 80/1, with a couple of 33/1 winners thrown in to boot!

Gordon Elliott has won 3 of those renewals from 26 runners with a further 5 placing. Joseph O’Brien is also 2 from 10 so maybe concentrating on that duo of yards may home in on this year’s winner.

Using the above in the 2025 renewal would have led us to homing in on the winner, Puturhandstogether (17/2, 13.71 BFSP).

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