Where it all began
There are many fans of racing for whom Istabraq winning the old 'Sunalliance' will still feel like it were yesterday - or last season, anyway. The truth is it was 28 seasons ago, and the great horse's owner JP McManus has yet to win the race since.
McManus, trainer Aidan O’Brien and jockey Charlie Swan had won it with Urubande as well the year before Istabraq in 1997, by which point it must have felt like the softest of targets for one of the sport’s wealthiest and most influential punters.
This was the race where it all began for McManus. He’d landed a monumental and well-storied gamble in the very same contest to open his Cheltenham Festival account with the green and gold hoops courtesy of Mister Donovan in the early-80s, and Istabraq’s subsequent exploits in becoming a legendary, triple Champion Hurdle winner can only have fuelled the fire for further success in the principal two-and-a-half mile race for budding hurdlers.
And yet here we are - 2025 and McManus is still probing, still paying his money and hoping against hope he can unearth the next ace in the pack. He’s done just that via other routes since those days, of course. Binocular (2010), Jezki (2014), Buveur D'Air (2017, 2018), Espoir d'Allen (2019) and Epatante (2020) have all brought more Champion Hurdle riches, though none of them took in the race still registered as the Baring Bingham Novices’ Hurdle.
Dan Skelton has never struck me as a man likely to struggle under the weight of a little pressure, but all being well come March 12 his highly promising horse The New Lion - recently acquired by JP from Darren and Annaley Yates for an undisclosed fee - will be bidding to break a long run of frustration in the opening race on day two of the Festival.
Skelton has trained just eight winners for McManus up to this point.
Unlucky for some
It’s not like McManus has come to this particular battle, now known as the Turners, mob-handed over the years. Far from it, in fact. There were three quiet editions for the owner straight after Istabraq - no dog in the fight as it were - and no Festival at all in 2001 after the horrors of foot-and-mouth disease swept through Britain and beyond.
Since then, McManus has only had 13 runners across 12 of the 26 subsequent renewals of the Turners. Four of those have finished second and one other was third, resulting in a place strike-rate of 38.4%. There was one faller and the other seven all finished out of the money.
The one year he was double-entered, the two horses ended up sixth and 15th, while in terms of trainers it's predictably Nicky Henderson who has provided the most runners with five.
Edward O’Grady and Alan King have saddled two apiece for the big meeting’s winning-most owner, and all four have managed to hit the frame. Perhaps even more surprisingly, McManus’s past two Turners runners have been trained by Padraig Roche and Philip Hobbs.
Plenty more fish in the sea
Over The Bar was McManus’s sole representative in the Grade 1 in the years between Istabraq’s triumph and his next runner in 2005. The patient approach so nearly paid off too, O’Grady’s horse kept fresh after a disappointing third in the Slaney Novice Hurdle (now Lawlor’s of Naas) before filling the runner-up spot behind Tom George's Galileo at the Festival.
It was O'Grady again who almost came up trumps five years later, the German Flat recruit Catch Me solid in the market beforehand and looking the most likely winner when tackling - and briefly heading - the front-running Massini’s Maguire soon after jumping three-out.
Massini's Maguire ultimately proved too tough and too good on the climb to the line, Catch Me collared for second by Tidal Bay after being tight for room on the run-in. Back in seventh, incidentally, the 2010 Gold Cup winner Imperial Commander. A good race for some January nostalgia, I think you'd agree.
The next two to go close for McManus were both trained by King, and Karabak was of a similar mould to this year’s prized asset - that is, he was privately purchased mid-season with a view to landing Festival honours.
Having bolted up under a penalty at Ascot in January 2009, Karabak was all the rage in the antepost market for Cheltenham but was a shade unfortunate to bump into eventual race-day favourite Mikael D’Haguenet, who overcame widely held fears concerning spring ground to win stylishly in the unmistakeable hands of Ruby Walsh.
Then came Yanworth seven years later. He’d been snapped up right at the start of his career, immediately after winning a Wincanton bumper in King’s own colours, and he’d won four times over hurdles en route to the Festival where he went off a red-hot 11/10 favourite to beat - in essence - four Willie Mullins horses.
Brave Yanworth accounted for three of them easily enough, but it was another inspired, inside ride from a peak Walsh that did for JP's hopes, the quirky and gifted Yorkhill getting a dream run on the bend as Barry Geraghty was buffeted out four-wide on the helpless jolly.
Challow’ed be thy name
There have been a few ropey chances among the Henderson-trained handful in this division down the years, but in 2019 along came Champ, whose form figures during a lengthy, second novice hurdle campaign that began in May 2018 ended up reading 111121.
He is unquestionably the one that got away for McManus and all of those associated with the team. If they could’ve switched that string of results to 222212, they'd probably have bitten your hand off.
Named after AP McCoy, Champ did go on to achieve Festival glory in remarkable circumstances via the following year's RSA Novices' Chase, but the Ballymore as it was then somehow eluded him, despite going into what looked a weak enough field with the highest official rating and a wealth of experience upon which he could draw.
You’d be hard pressed to say that Champ was desperately unlucky in the run that day, although it must still rankle that Martin Brassil’s winner City Island was readily beaten in his seven subsequent starts after running the race of his life and seemingly leaving it all out there on the hill.
Champ was, of course, a Challow Hurdle winner and in being beaten at the Festival was adding his name to a long line of Newbury heroes to get turned over in the Turners. The current tally stands at every single one of the past 21 Challow winners to have lined up in this race, but could one of the longest-standing Festival hoodoos be about to be broken by The New Lion this spring?
Maybe not, with the Sky Bet Supreme also under consideration too by all accounts, unsurprisingly too given how he jumps and travels, but whoever can lay claim to being chief talent-spotter for McManus evidently doesn’t buy into the doom-mongering around what's played out in the past.
It's very much all about the future for The New Lion, for the Skeltons and for his new owner. Perhaps this season's Challow winner is the brilliant outlier - the statistical anomaly - that everyone has been waiting for. We've all waited long enough, not many more so than McManus himself.
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