Watch out Cheltenham: Dublin's Racing Festival is haring up on the inside rail
WINNER ALRIGHT: Massive crowds at Leopardstown watch the Novice Hurdle on day one of the Dublin Racing Festival last year.
Only three cosmic questions remain that have yet to be satisfactorily answered by mankind. Firstly, is there really a God? Secondly, why do we exist? Difficult considerations for sure, but given enough time and head space some future philosopher is bound to come up with the right answers.
The third is much trickier and profoundly complex: What’s to be done with the ‘be all, end all’ Cheltenham festival and its tendency to suck the lifeblood from the rest of the National Hunt season?
The problem is not recent. Cheltenham week was entrenched at the seasonal summit many decades ago and had become such a sacral event that to challenge its supremacy was almost deemed to be heretical. Routines were built around it and budgets carefully managed to ensure there was sufficient funding available for the annual trip to Gloucestershire.
English racegoers would spend the early spring making sure that their ‘Harris Tweed Brown Herringbone’ suits were perfectly pressed for the big occasion and once Christmas had come and gone their Irish counterparts would lie awake at night, fretting on when the best time would be to break it to the Missus that they’d be disappearing for a week and taking the household savings with them.
Two divided nations, united as one each year and singing the same anthem from the same sheet music. But there are indications recently that this balance is beginning to shift, indications which started in earnest on the first weekend in February 2018. That was when an idea that had been germinating in the fiendishly clever minds of the marketeers at Leopardstown and the HRI first saw the light of day. The idea had two strands: What if we consolidate the mishmash of post-Christmas Leopardstown meetings into one weekend spectacular and brand it as the Dublin Racing Festival (DRF)? What if we throw a couple of million into the prize fund to try to attract the best horses in training?
This weekend the DRF celebrates its fifth birthday and while still suffering from some niggly growing pains there is a mounting belief that the Dublin Festival is proving to be a significant ‘disrupter’ to the prevailing status quo.
There are issues to be resolved. The first is to clarify what the meeting actually is: (a) A fully-fledged stand-alone independent national hunt horseracing festival or (b) Merely a lucrative starter dish before the main course is served up at Cheltenham. Obviously, the first option is the desirable one but there is an irritating elephant in the front room that first needs to be dealt with.
The elephant in question is the incomprehensible reluctance of British-based trainers to have runners in Dublin. Their rationale being that five weeks before Cheltenham is far too close to the big meeting to risk sending horses abroad. It’s a maddening overindulgence of caution.
But the time the sun goes down over the Cotswolds on St Patrick's Day, English trainers will again be ‘marvelling’ through gritted teeth at their Irish counterparts and ‘admiring’ under their breath that they have plundered another twenty-something victories and several millions of their pounds in just four short days.
At some point the penny must surely drop with them that quite a few of those winners will have also run the DRF and that if a process has proven overwhelmingly successful then it is often a good idea to copy it. Only three (3!) raiders have bothered to travel this weekend.
Another bugbear for British-based trainers, and this one is usually expressed carefully, like footballers whispering secretively from behind a covering hand, is the numerical and financial dominance of Willie Mullins of Irish and British jump racing. ‘Something must be done!’ But nobody ever suggested that Tiger Woods should start yipping short putts or Roger Federer serve double faults to give less talented challengers a shot at their titles. Mullins is going to keep doing what Mullins does and will probably even find better ways to do it.
Half of the entries for the weekend’s Grade Ones are trained by Mullins and he is an amazingly short, but not unreasonable, 11/1 to win all eight of the top races. The most intriguing race of the season so far is the Arkle Chase on Saturday where Mullins saddles five, including Appreciate It and Dysart Dynamo so it’s not as if his horses avoid each other. Rivals certainly won’t catch up with him by repetition of the failing ‘let’s all chicken out’ strategy.
Interestingly, while their trainers run for cover, British racegoers are beginning to see the logic of sidestepping the Cheltenham festival and instead enjoying a great weekend in Dublin. Data tracking of pre-DRF ticket sales indicates that up to 15% of the crowd this year will cross the Irish Sea, up from 4% in 2019.
Ironically, the price of a beer at a recent snooker tournament at the Cheltenham course may prove to be the accelerator of this momentum. Customers at the green baize were charged £6 a pint when it will be £7.50 on the green grass of the festival.
Punters exploded on social media when they heard this, demanding an explanation as to why they have to fork out a 25% premium for the pleasure of a warm beer in a plastic cup at a race-meeting? It all kicked off from here and like a marital argument many other pent up irritations soon came flooding out.
Like, why do I have to pay over €100 for one day’s racing at Cheltenham when it's less than half that for two days at Leopardstown? Or, why do I have to put up with aggressive high-viz jacketed crowd control at home when there is warm informality and an authentic racing crowd available in Ireland? On it went and on it still goes but the likely conclusion is that the DRF will become a more multinational event and continue to chip away at Cheltenham dominance.
While all these issues unfold there remains the challenge of lightening bookies satchels this weekend. Five years of DRF is long enough to discern patterns that will spotlight winners next month and analysis of the Grade One races indicates that whoever wins the Spring Juvenile, the Tattersalls Novice and the Irish Champion Hurdles in particular, will have a strong chance of doubling up in the equivalent races at Cheltenham.
The probable winners of these races, Lossiemouth, Facile Vega and State Man are short-priced favourites and the treble will only pay about 5/2. If, and when, they win this weekend, the odds for a Cheltenham treble, presently a cumulative 23/1, (non-runner no bet) is likely to constrict, so it might be better value just to watch today, but bet for Cheltenham and hopefully collect more lucratively in five weeks time.
A simple answer to a non-cosmic question.
