Money talks and that's why the Irish hold sway at Cheltenham festival

The Guardian

09-03-2025

Cheltenham has made several changes to races at its festival in an attempt to boost the competitiveness of the action on the track, but there is one long odds-on shot over the four days that is still reliably rock‑solid. The 2025 festival will be the 10th anniversary of the last season when British trainers saddled more winners at the meeting than their Irish counterparts and Ireland is no bigger than 1-9 to extend its winning streak into a second decade.
As an annual celebration of Irish culture and achievement on foreign soil, the Cheltenham festival now feels inked into the calendar as firmly as the St Patrick's Day parade in New York. Yet it is a situation that would have seemed unthinkable at the turn of the century, when Ireland's return of three wins at what was then a 19-race festival was pretty much par for the course.
Nor is it simply in terms of winners that Ireland now dominates the festival. For the past three seasons, Ireland has also supplied a majority of the runners and the entries over the four days this coming week suggest Irish runners will once again outnumber their locally trained rivals.
Even in a year when Nicky Henderson has the odds-on favourite for the feature event on the first two days of the meeting – Constitution Hill,, in the Champion Hurdle on Tuesday, and Jonbon, in Wednesday's Champion Chase – there is no real sense of an imminent revival in overall British fortunes at the festival. But what about in another five or 10 years? What will it take to get British jumping back to at least a semblance of parity with its rival across the Irish Sea?
Tom Malone, one of the leading bloodstock agents buying horses for British yards, sourced Native River, the last British-trained Gold Cup winner, in 2018, and One For Arthur, Lucinda Russell's 2017 Grand National winner, from the Irish point-to-pointing field. He continues to 'fight the good fight', as he puts it, on behalf of Britain's top jumps trainers, hoping to buy the next British-trained Gold Cup winner too, but he is realistic about the scale of the task.
'I know every horse that moves,' says Malone. 'We just can't afford to buy them. Thirty years ago, the Irish didn't have the money to keep the horses and that's why they all ended up in England. People say that the Irish keep the best horses [now], but that's not true. They spend the most money on them to keep them, because at the end of the day, if you're selling a horse, you don't care who buys it. You just want the most money, and fortunately for the Irish, they're the ones in the position to give you the most money now.'
The UK's population is many times that of Ireland and it has many more individuals with the vast wealth required to build and maintain a big string of horses. Within that relatively tiny slice of the overall populations, however, Ireland currently has a much higher proportion who actually want to buy young National Hunt prospects, as opposed to mansions, superyachts or Old Masters.
'Of all the horses that moved in Ireland, out of the top 25, 20 of them stayed in Ireland,' Malone says of last season. 'They are the ones that are perceived to be the best and whether they are or they aren't in the end, you can guarantee that five, six or seven will be. If only three or four of the top 25 are seeping to the British Isles, you're already against the tide and you're not playing with the right numbers.
'If you look at the top 20 in the rich list in Ireland, 10 of them are embedded in racing, whether it be flat or jumps. They are comfortable spending a lot of money to find the fastest horse and they are not expecting the horse to make it back [in prize money]. It's their fun, it's what makes their heart flicker.'
From this angle, Ireland's domination at Cheltenham is perhaps an inevitable result of the wholesale transformation of jumping over three or four decades, from a country sport for enthusiasts and hobbyists in which a handful of horses was seen as a significant string to a money-drenched, ultra-professional industry with a major, four-day national sporting event as its focus.
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As jumping has become increasingly professional and competitive so has the process of sourcing the best prospects. The market for the most promising point-to-pointers is now highly efficient, and it is the Irish owners who generally stump up the final bid to secure the champions of three or four years' time. If so, the implication is that the trend of ever-increasing Irish success is just the status quo. Perhaps, as a result, it is time to move on.
'There are still strong players among British trainers,' says Anthony Bromley, also an agent with vast experience of the market. 'But we like to put a label on where horses are trained, when it's similar to pedigrees and everything can be intermixed these days. A good horse can be foaled in France, reared in Ireland as a youngster and sold from a point-to-point to an owner based in England.
'There will be runners trained by an Englishman [Noel George] who is based in France. Do we even need to make it into an English/Irish, us-and-them situation any more? I'm not sure we do.'