Is hurdling now the poor relation of jumps racing?

No depth to Champion division

Looking at the championship races at this year’s Cheltenham Festival, it's hard to escape the conclusion that hurdling is the poor relation of jumps racing at present. The Champion Hurdle might have had a winner worthy of the race’s title, but there was no depth whatsoever to the field State Man beat, while the Stayers’ Hurdle line-up largely consisted of old-timers or chasers not up to Gold Cup standard seeking potentially easier pickings over hurdles.

The Champion Hurdle was, of course, lacking the brilliant title holder Constitution Hill who’d had State Man back in second in 2023. But the absence of the previous year’s 4/11 winner just resulted in another long-odds-on shot having the opportunity to dominate another threadbare field for what should be the season’s highlight for two-mile hurdlers.

Irish Point was the only one of State Man’s rivals to start at single-figure odds but in an opportunistic move he was only switched late from the Stayers’ Hurdle (having won a Grade 1 over three miles at Leopardstown) once Constitution Hill’s absence was confirmed. The latter’s stablemate Luccia, third at 33/1, had hardly been shaping like a realistic Champion Hurdle contender beforehand either, having shown no better than useful form when winning a premier handicap at Ascot on her previous start.

Luccia seemingly proved herself a smart mare in the Champion Hurdle but whether she’s quite as good as Lossiemouth, who landed the odds in the David Nicholson Mares’ Hurdle forty minutes later, is another matter. In fact, Lossiemouth, with her mares’ allowance, might well have been the main threat to State Man in the Champion Hurdle had Willie Mullins not opted to keep the two apart.

At a time when the Champion Hurdle is clearly desperately lacking championship-standard runners – male or female – the last thing it needs is a rival race on the same card liable to syphon off credible contenders. The Festival might be dubbed 'jump racing’s Olympics’, but unlike at the real thing, the best of both sexes can – and should – take each other on. A Grade 1 hurdle for mares is a welcome addition to the jumps programme and Cheltenham is as good a place as any to stage it, but Trials Day in January would be a better date than a clash with the Champion Hurdle at the Festival.

But that’s rather a side issue to the much bigger problem of a lack of good hurdlers that's evident on both sides of the Irish Sea. Britain’s two other open Grade 1 two-mile hurdles before the Champion Hurdle, the Fighting Fifth and the Christmas Hurdle, were contested by a total of nine horses earlier this season but with Christmas Hurdle winner Constitution Hill missing from the Champion Hurdle, only one of the other eight, twelve-year-old Not So Sleepy, who won the rearranged Fighting Fifth at Sandown, was deemed worthy of a place in the Champion field. Starting at 33/1, he finished seventh of eight, beaten over fifty lengths.

Meanwhile, over in Ireland, State Man had been facing minimal opposition in winning their Grade 1 two-mile hurdles, the Morgiana at Punchestown and the Matheson and Irish Champion Hurdle at Leopardstown, for the second season running. But he faced only three rivals in each of those races and a measly total of just five different opponents across the three races, none of whom were in the Champion Hurdle line-up. Two of those were stablemates Echoes In Rain – who ran in all three contests - and Impaire Et Passe who ran in the two Leopardstown races. Gordon Elliott took him on in the Morgiana with Fils d’Oudairies (who had another go in the Matheson) and Pied Piper, while Henry de Bromhead had a crack with Bob Olinger in the Irish Champion.

So what has happened to all the Champion Hurdle horses?

We can start to answer the burning question by looking back at the Champion Hurdle from 25 years ago. The 1999 renewal was also won by an Irish-trained odds-on shot, with Istabraq winning the second of his three Champion Hurdles for Aidan O’Brien.

There were 14 runners that year and Istabraq was among eleven of the field who had begun their careers on the Flat, having previously raced for Hamdan Al Maktoum and John Gosden. Another runner, the Juddmonte-bred Upgrade, although bred for the Flat, hadn’t run on the level but debuted instead over hurdles as a three-year-old. That left just two ‘National Hunt’ types in the 1999 Champion Hurdle, with French Holly and Mister Morose, who finished third and fourth, both starting out in bumpers. Two of the beaten horses in the 1999 Champion Hurdle had been smart performers on the Flat, Goodwood Cup winner Grey Shot and Hardwicke Stakes runner-up Midnight Legend.

The Champion Hurdle had been won by purpose-bred jumpers in the late twentieth-century such as Dawn Run and the brothers Morley Street and Granville Again, but the list of Champion Hurdle winners who’d started out on the Flat first is a long and illustrious one. It includes those top-class dual winners and regular rivals from the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of hurdling, Night Nurse, Monksfield and Sea Pigeon (who ran in the Derby), Nicky Henderson’s first Champion Hurdle winner See You Then who won it three times, the Sheikh Mohammed-owned pair Kribensis and Royal Gait (who’d been first past the post in an Ascot Gold Cup), and Alderbrook (a Group 2 winner on the Flat), Collier Bay and Make A Stand in the years immediately prior to Istabraq.

But the make-up of the Champion Hurdle field these days is very different. Only three of the eight runners in this year’s race had started out on the Flat, old Not So Sleepy and the ex-French pair Zarak The Brave and Nemean Lion, the latter previously trained by Andre Fabre for Godolphin.

Most of the others had begun their careers in bumpers in either Britain (Luccia), Ireland (Colonel Mustard) or France (Irish Point and Iberico Lord, both being designated AQPS or ‘non-thoroughbred’). As for State Man, he’d finished second over hurdles on his debut at Auteuil in the May of his three-year-old season before being snapped up by the Mullins team.

Istabraq was by no means the last Flat-bred Champion Hurdle winner but there has been a definite shift since the first of Mullins’ Champion Hurdle winners Hurricane Fly who was successful in 2011 and 2013. Like his immediate predecessors Sublimity (a listed winner for Sir Michael Stoute), Katchit, Punjabi and Binocular, Hurricane Fly had come from the Flat, where he’d beaten the subsequent Champion Stakes winner Literato in a listed race in France.

But after five consecutive Champion Hurdle winners from the Flat, the ten different winners since Hurricane Fly have all come from a jumping background. As mentioned already, State Man started off over hurdles in France. Three others, Rock On Ruby, Jezki and Annie Power, began their careers in bumpers in Britain or Ireland, while the J. P. McManus-owned trio of Buveur d’Air, Espoir d’Allen and Epatante – like his runner Iberico Lord in this year’s race - were all AQPS horses from French bumpers. McManus’s recent Champion Hurdle horses, therefore, are very different types to the blue-blooded Istabraq, his first winner, who was a half-brother to a Derby winner, Secreto! The very next Champion Hurdle winner after Istabraq, Hors La Loi III in 2002, was ahead of his time as a French non-thoroughbred, but very much the shape of things to come as it turned out.

But perhaps the best proof that the Champion Hurdle is contested by a completely different type of horse nowadays to when Istabraq was beating other Flat-types, is that three other recent winners – Faugheen, Honeysuckle and Constitution Hill – all began their careers in Irish points, more traditionally a nursery for Gold Cup winners and unthinkable once as a source of horses quick enough to be Champion Hurdlers.

In the current century, one of the main traditional sources of jumpers, and hurdlers in particular – Flat cast-offs – has virtually dried up, at the same time as two other supply chains, which produce purpose-bred jumpers and therefore chasing types, have boomed – Irish points and French bumpers/juvenile hurdles. Middle-distance Flat performers are still going through the ring at the horses in training sales, just as Istabraq did back in the day, but these days they’re much more likely to end up in Australia or the Middle East – another twenty-first century phenomenon - than over hurdles.

There are, of course, a few exceptions like the recent Champion Hurdle winners who show enough ability in their novice hurdle days to make it more worthwhile to keep them over the smaller obstacles and exploit the uncompetitive Grade 1 opportunities which the likes of Honeysuckle, Constitution Hill and State Man have all done to such great effect racking up sequences of wins in recent seasons. It sounds as though the latest Baring Bingham winner, the very exciting Ballyburn, will also be kept hurdling, in the short term at least, for all that his pedigree, physique and pointing background point to him making an even better chaser.

Are this year's ace novices headed for chasing?

It was striking from Timeform’s reports on this year’s Festival’s novice hurdles how many of the runners looked embryonic chasers. And not just in those races either, as the principals in the Martin Pipe, all Irish novices too, appeal as chasing types as well. Even the winner of the Triumph Hurdle, a race which was once very much the preserve of ex- Flat racers, struck our racecourse representative as ‘an exciting prospect for novice chasing’ in the longer term. The imposing Majborough, who was the pick of the Triumph field on looks, had begun his career over hurdles in France the previous spring, just like his stablemate and runner-up Kargese.

And if fences are the ultimate aim for so many of the best and most expensive jumping prospects these days and who already have experience in points, then why bother with hurdles at all? That was the approach Mullins took with his Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase winner Fact To File who had finished second in the Champion Bumper at the age of six last year. Already a winning pointer, Mullins evidently took the view that a novice hurdle campaign this term would effectively be a wasted season with a potential Gold Cup horse, hence the decision to put him straight over fences. It’s something Mullins has done before with the likes of Champion Bumper winners Florida Pearl and Missed That and it will be interesting to see if this becomes more common practice in future.

Where does this all leave the Stayers’ Hurdle?

What is very evident is that, as with the Champion Hurdle, the field for the latest renewal won by Teahupoo had a very different overall profile from the one won by Anzum 25 years ago. There were a dozen runners in 1999, as there were this year. But the age of the runners in the 1999 field ranged from five to eight, with the average being just under seven. In this year’s race, seven was the minimum age (that of the winner), going up to twelve for the former winners Sire du Berlais and the subsequently retired Paisley Park. That resulted in a field whose average age was actually older than those in the Gold Cup.

It wouldn’t be fair to label all those in the Stayers’ Hurdle field that had run over fences as failures over the larger obstacles because former Grand National winner Noble Yeats was prepping for another crack at Aintree but several others in the field hadn’t made it to the top of the chasing tree for one reason or another. It’s surely no coincidence that the weakness of the staying hurdle division in recent seasons and the lack of younger blood which was clearly there in 1999 is part of the trend discussed earlier.

If hurdling is now the poorer relation in jumps racing, then the consequence ought to be that chasing should be benefiting, though the concentration of much of the top talent with the wealthiest owners in a handful of yards is another of the forces at work.

Ideally, of course, the top hurdles would be every bit as competitive as the top chases. But that’s clearly not the case at present and, with the link largely broken now between the Flat and the jumps, and the big money going on the winners of four-year-old points in Ireland and on the chasing types produced by the French system, that situation doesn’t look likely to change for the foreseeable future.

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