Research Corner – Cheltenham Festival 2023
The 2023 Cheltenham Festival gets underway on Tuesday March 14th and over the four days of pulsating action there are no less than fourteen Grade One races as the best horses, trainers and jockeys go head to head.
It is a Festival that dreams are made of, and back in the day yours truly made an annual pilgrimage to Prestbury Park and showing my age, the delights on offer included the Milk Marketing Board selling hot cocoa, and what is now known as the Guinness village was a mere single unit selling their famous black stuff to a steady flow of folk!
Over the years the Cheltenham Festival has grown into an amazing spectacle with an additional day added to mix up the diversity to the racing line-up and widen the scope for owners and trainers to achieve their ambition of standing in the winners’ enclosure at the home of National Hunt racing.
Of course, the Festival is to be savoured and enjoyed as the pinnacle of the National Hunt campaign but landing a few profitable bets will make it even more enjoyable!
Setting the Scene
So, who have been the key movers and shakers at the famous Prestbury Park Festival over the last 5 years?
Top Trainers
*Gordon Elliott was serving a ban during the 2021 Festival and the horses ran under the care of Denise Foster.
The most surprising name missing from the above table is 13 times Champion National Hunt Trainer Paul Nicholls, whose record over the most recent 5 year period at the Festival is just 5 winners from 94 runners, and you have to go back to 2020 for his last winner.
Looking at the above data we can see that simply blindly backing the top 4 yards at Betfair SP would have yielded some impressive gains…. however as ever the devil is in the detail as can be seen by the year by year breakdown.
Clearly the profits have been in decline since the heady heights of 2019 but collectively this group of trainers have continued to plunder the majority of the races at each of the last five Festivals.
We will now take a closer look at each of the yards to see if we can find any potential nuggets from their numerous runners and winners.
Willie Mullins
Willie Mullins lost the patronage of Michael O’Leary and the Gigginstown Stud at the end of the 2018 season, but he still managed to land four winners at the 2019 Festival and increase his return on investment (ROI) to boot.
In the 3 subsequent years he has added another 23 winners to the Festival tally but backing the yards’ runners blindly would have resulted in losses.
With that in mind we will dig a little further starting with the breakdown of Handicaps and Non- Handicaps.
It is pretty clear from the above that the runners in Handicap races at the Festival aren’t a route to profits.
If we consider the type of Non-Handicap races, we find a couple of categories to home in on which are Novice Hurdles and the National Hunt Races (also known as Bumpers).
System 50: JO-100-50-03-23-SC: Back the runners trained by Willie Mullins at the Cheltenham Festival when they are competing in Novice Hurdles and Bumpers.
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Featured Image: Image by Jean Louis Tosque from Pixabay
