Latest news with #Cheltenhamfestival
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Sundance Kid' JP McManus has five shots at Grand National history
For a man who is still most familiar to many fans as the most fearless gambler of recent decades, JP McManus does not seem to be leaving a great deal to chance before Saturday's Grand National at Aintree. Three of the top six in the betting for the world's most famous steeplechase – Iroko, Perceval Legallois and last year's winner, I Am Maximus – will carry the owner's famous green and gold colours this weekend, along with a live each-way shot in Meetingofthewaters. The Sundance Kid – as he was nicknamed in Ireland's betting rings in the 1970s – is now in his mid-70s, but he shows no sign of slowing down. Quite the opposite, in fact. He went into last month's Cheltenham festival as the meeting's all-time leading owner with 78 wins over the course of 43 years since Mister Donovan gave him his first festival winner in 1982. Over the course of just four days, he added six more, including a second Gold Cup victory with Inothewayurthinkin. The nature of the competition in National Hunt racing has changed considerably since McManus bought his first horse in 1977. Owners including the Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary, the former banker Rich Ricci and the construction magnate Brian Acheson have brought serious spending power to what was once a less money-driven cousin to the serious business on the Flat. But the ex-bookie and punter from Limerick, who laid his first bet at his local greyhound track, has more than held his own. More than 200 individual horses have carried his colours – adopted in honour of his local Gaelic Athletic Association club – in the current season, and a piece of racing history is within sight at the weekend, too. McManus is already one of just six owners – including O'Leary, Trevor Hemmings and, interestingly, the legendary Victorian owner-gambler James Machell – to have won the Grand National three times. Victory for any of his runners on Saturday would give him the outright record, in the race that most owners want to win above all others. His three winners to date have all been memorable in their way. Don't Push It, in 2010, finally gave Tony McCoy a victory at the 15th attempt, while Minella Times in 2021 was more significant still, as Rachael Blackmore became the first female jockey to ride the winner. I Am Maximus, meanwhile, was the springboard for Willie Mullins, his trainer, to become the first Irish-based winner of the British jump trainers' championship for 70 years. All three had different trainers, and it is sign of how widely McManus has always spread his horses that two more – Gavin Cromwell, who saddles Perceval Legallois, and the British yard of Oliver Greenall and Josh Guerriero, who train Iroko – will hope to join the list on Saturday. Chantry House, a 100-1 outsider, is his other runner. More than 60 trainers, in fact, have saddled a runner in green and gold this season, including about 20 British stables. While many owners focus their investment on a handful of trainers, McManus's training fees feed the grassroots as well. Frank Berry, an ex-jockey who has been McManus's racing manager for as long as anyone can remember, is in no doubt about which of the team's horses he would ride at Aintree if he had the chance. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion 'It's hard to get away from Maximus, he's the class horse in the race. We've often had numbers there all right, but they didn't figure at the right end [of the market],' Berry said on Wednesday. 'We've a good team going this year and they're all in good form.' Any one of Iroko, I Am Maximus or Perceval Legallois could set off as the favourite on Saturday afternoon, but if one of the trio does indeed emerge from the pack to head the market, it is unlikely to be McManus's money that puts him there. The great gambler's tilts at the ring have largely been consigned to history, along with the handful of much-missed figures in the bookmaking jungle who were more than willing to take him on. The ebb and flow of his six-figure jousting with 'Fearless' Freddie Williams at Cheltenham around the turn of the century became the stuff of festival legend, including the day when McManus relieved his bookie of nearly £1m with a £100k bet on a winning favourite at 6-1 and £2k each-way on a successful 50-1 shot in the Pertemps Final. Perhaps the business of amassing a $2bn fortune through Forex trading and property investments has also removed the need to have a bet on his horses. Racing history, meanwhile, is another way to measure success, though Berry suggests it is the last thing on the owner's mind. 'Not at all,' he says, when asked if a fourth National winner would be a special moment for McManus. 'He enjoys the horses running in the big races and all races, and having a winner anywhere around the country.'
The Guardian
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV tonight: the wild story of how Falun Gong hacked Chinese news
10pm, BBC Four In 2002, activists from the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong managed to commandeer a Chinese state news broadcast to rebut what they saw as slander by the authorities. Two decades later, the comic-book artist Daxiong, who took part in the audacious plot, has painstakingly researched the guerrilla operation that changed his life. Featuring striking animation, this gripping film dramatises the hijack and its aftermath, including police raids that forced Daxiong to flee the country. Graeme Virtue 8pm, BBC One Katrina Bowen, a newly single mum, needs a fresh start. Having moved herself and her four children to the Welsh countryside, she calls on Stacey to help her sort through years of accumulated possessions. But 'things' aren't just 'things', are they? These items also tell the story of a difficult few years for the Bowens. Ellen E Jones 8pm, Channel 4 This new documentary series charts two plucky groups of teens – one from a diverse south London secondary school, the other from a rural Arkansas high school – as they trade places. Despite a very real sense of cultural dislocation, everyone's heart seems to be in the right place as they get to grips with energised cheer squads and scratchy school blazers, respectively. GV 9pm, BBC One Professional judgments clouded by personal dilemmas, love lives under threat and an 8.30am breathalyser test – sounds like another chaotic day at Waterloo Road. After learning that her abusive ex is getting married, Amy intervenes in the relationship of two of her students. Hollie Richardson 9pm, Sky Atlantic What is particularly fascinating about this drama on Mussolini's rise to power in Italy is how he bypassed established levers of democracy. Now, as his authority hardens, Il Duce (Luca Marinelli) uses the party list system to undermine rival political groups. Jack Seale 9pm, Sky Witness Kathy Bates excels as a lawyer on a secret mission to avenge her daughter's death. The list of suspects at the law firm is shrinking, which means Matty has to consider whether the answer is the one she doesn't want. As usual, the case of the week – a pregnant woman apparently fired for trying to unionise – keys smartly into that theme. JS Racing: Cheltenham festival 12.45pm, ITV1. Day one of four, concluding on Friday with the Gold Cup. Champions League football: Liverpool v Paris Saint-Germain 8pm, Prime Video. The second leg of the last-16 tie.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Money talks and that's why the Irish hold sway at Cheltenham festival
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. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Carlisle 2.00 Smart Decision 2.30 Smokeringinthedark 3.00 Master Breffni 3.30 Tyson Magoo 4.00 Hello Judge 4.35 Milajess 5.10 Saint Calvados Warwick 2.20 Ostrava Du Berlais 2.50 King Ulanda (nap) 3.20 St Pancras 3.50 Gentleman Jacques 4.23 Sole Solution 4.58 Illico De Cotte (nb) 5.30 Destination Dubai 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.'
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Bowen to miss Cheltenham Festival after ban
Welsh rider James Bowen will miss the Cheltenham festival after being given a seven-day ban. Bowen, 23, rode Zestful Hope to victory at Hereford on Sunday but was found guilty of excessive use of his whip approaching the home bend. The suspension runs from March 11 to 17. Bowen shared the spoils with brother Sean at Cheltenham racecourse in December after a dead heat was recorded between their horses. Latest horse racing results
