Talking Horses: racing’s most exciting rematch may be saved for Cheltenham

The two horses at the top of the betting for the Queen Mother Champion Chase in March both came through their races at the weekend with a minimum of fuss and in fairly similar style. Jonbon eased away from Edwardstone after the last in the Tingle Creek Chase on Saturday, 24 hours before El Fabiolo finished around five lengths clear on his return to action at Cork.

Willie Mullins’s El Fabiolo is now a shade of odds-on for the Champion Chase while Jonbon, who was five-and-a-half lengths adrift when runner-up behind El Fabiolo in the Arkle Trophy in March, is an 11-4 shot. Their potential head-to-head in just over three months’ time promises to be one of the highlights of the Festival.

Related: Jonbon takes Tingle Creek chance after Henderson makes ‘difficult decisions’

Their respective trainers’ thoughts on what they might do in the meantime, though, were interesting in the context of ongoing concerns about the competitiveness of National Hunt racing away from the big Festivals in the spring.

Nicky Henderson mentioned both the Grade One Clarence House Chase at Ascot in late January and the Grade Two Game Spirit Chase at Newbury a fortnight later as possible targets for Jonbon. “I can’t see that they [Jonbon and El Fabiolo] will meet on the way,” he said. “I don’t think we will be going to Ireland [for the Dublin Racing Festival] and I’m rather hoping Willie will play the same game as us, and we will get ready for a rematch in March.”

From Henderson’s point of view, this probably makes sense, but he would surely understand too if many racegoers and punters – and Ascot, for that matter – were rather hoping for the opposite. And Mullins, it seems, is indeed keen to run El Fabiolo in the Clarence House. “We’ll look at Christmas [at Leopardstown] as well, but he will probably go to Ascot,” the trainer said.

Whether Jonbon will be there to greet him if he does remains to be seen, but it does not require a great deal of decoding of Henderson’s comment to suspect that the alternative target at Newbury, against less demanding opposition, would suddenly have rather more appeal.

Ffos Las
12.20 Ballymagroarty Boy 12.52 The Jukebox Man 1.22 Steel Ally 1.52 Passing Kate 2.22 The King Of Ryhope (nap) 2.52 John Betjeman 3.22 Boston Joe

Fontwell
12.40 Quel Destin 1.10 River Gold 1.40 It’s Easy 2.10 Herakles Westwood 2.40 Easy To Follow 3.10 Aviles 3.40 He’s A Latchico

Wincanton
12.45 Lump Sum 1.15 Rajaran 1.45 Don’t Rightly Know 2.15 King Turgeon 2.45 Him Malaya 3.15 Fame And Fun 3.45 Crest Of Fortune

Southwell
5.00 Likeashadow 5.30 Teddy Brown 6.00 Danielle 6.30 Phoenix Beach 7.00 Enola Grey 7.30 Khabib (nb) 8.00 Rubeus 8.30 Le Rouge Chinois

To be fair to Henderson, he was prioritising Cheltenham in March for his stable stars back in the days when Ireland as a whole struggled to muster more than a couple of Festival winners at best.

He also ran Shishkin against Mullins’s Energumene in the Clarence House in 2022, which turned out to be one of the most memorable contests of recent years as Shishkin got up to win a few strides from the line and extend his unbeaten run over fences to seven races. But Shishkin was then pulled up at odds-on in the Champion Chase after jumping just eight fences, while Energumene went on to record the first of two straight wins in the two-mile championship event.

It is also not that long since Henderson’s Altior lost his unbeaten record over fences at the 20th attempt, when 1-3 for the 1965 Chase in November 2019. Altior won only one of his three subsequent starts, and his trainer still regrets the decision to run him at Ascot.

But as Lydia Hislop, one of Racing TV’s senior reporters and journalists, recently pointed out, there were just 47 horses rated 151 or above stabled in British yards at the end of the 2022-23 campaign. There are also nearly 150 races at Grade One, Grade Two, Listed or Premier Handicap level to be filled in the five months from October to February.

It is hardly a secret that Irish jumping is currently in a much better place than its British counterpart. By several measures, Ireland’s racing industry is significantly smaller than the UK’s, with fewer horses, fewer meetings and less prize money – but it has the lion’s share of the best chasers and hurdlers, as their increasing dominance at Cheltenham in recent seasons has shown.

This is, in part, because the spending power of Ireland’s major owners has overwhelmed that of the British jumps fraternity over the past 15 or 20 years. Some of their horses end up in British stables – Shishkin, for instance, is owned by the Dublin-based Joe Donnelly, while Jonbon runs for JP McManus, who topped the owners’ table in both Ireland and Britain last year. But there are also significant owners based in Britain who are sending horses the other way, with Rich Ricci, a mainstay of the Mullins yard, being an obvious example.

The British Horseracing Authority’s much-anticipated “Premierisation” programme, for both jumps and Flat racing, begins in January, with limits on the number of courses that can race in a two-hour “window” on Saturday afternoon. The hope is that the weekend audience will find it easier to identify the meetings and races that really matter.

If the best of the relative handful of top-class jumping horses in British yards start being steered around Grade One races to wait for a less demanding alternative, however, the fare on offer to potential new fans will still consist of small fields and long odds-on favourites.

It would, of course, be greedy to expect a rerun of Shishkin v Energumene two seasons ago on a regular basis, but if one of the best and most successful jumps trainers of the past 40 years is hoping that the opposition will “play the same game” and stay away until March, we could be waiting a very long time for anything in the run-up to the Festival that even comes close.