Cheltenham festival 2026: news, previews, tips and more on Champion Hurdle day – live
Key events
Greg Wood
It may be a case of the heart ruling the head, but a horse I’ll be having a small each-way bet on in the opening Supreme Novice Hurdle is Barry Connell’s Eachtotheirown, who will be the trainer’s only runner at the meeting following the bitterly disappointing news last week that Marine Nationale had been scratched from his defence of the Champion Chase crown due to a minor injury.
Connell himself is fascinating and engaging character – a former stockbroker and hedge fund manager who learned to ride in his late 30s and rode several winners, including one here at Cheltenham, as an amateur in his 40s. He then moved into ownership and eventually into training his horses himself, in a yard built from scratch to his own design.
Connell never sends a horse to the festival for the sake of it, and his record at the meeting from just five runners is two wins – the other was Marine Nationale’s success in the Supreme three years ago – plus a second, a fourth and only one runner out of the frame.
Connell spoke in glowing terms about Eachtotheirown during a media event at his yard last month.
“He won his maiden hurdle in Galway and then we thought he was a certainty in the [Grade One] Royal Bond,” Connell said, “but in November we just seemed to have three or four weeks when the horses weren’t running well and he ran a shocker.
“Never one to waste a good crisis, I applied for a handicap mark for him and was given a rating of 124. We went to Thurles and he won by nine lengths and went up 13lb to 137.
“I think he is definitely capable of running to a mark significantly higher than that. He had to make his own running in his maiden hurdle and in the handicap. I think a truly run championship race where you can drop him in will suit him and he’s a super jumper. He’ll be a big price for the Supreme, but I definitely think he’ll be competitive.”
For anyone who is interested, there is 50-1 available about Eachtotheirown, including with bookmakers offering a quarter the odds and three places each-way.
Donald McRae
Sean Bowen can claim to be the best jockey in jumps racing by some distance. Next month he will be confirmed as champion jockey for the second successive year as, on 210 victories so far, he is 107 ahead of Harry Skelton, his closest rival. Bowen is already looking ahead to next season, where he harbours serious ambitions of becoming the first jump jockey to ride 300 winners in a single campaign. These are staggering numbers that stand in stark contrast to his miserable record at the Cheltenham festival.
The Welshman smiles more than any other jockey I’ve met – for he operates in a gruelling trade full of hard and often taciturn men who are all fated to lose far more often than they win. But Bowen has a remarkably phlegmatic outlook that means he grins when I read out his meagre statistics from the Cheltenham festival. Apart from not having a winner in 52 rides, the average starting price of those horses was 40-1.
Courtesy of Oddschecker, here are today’s three top market movers:
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Kurasso Blue (Challenge Cup) 5/1 from 10/1
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Sober Glory (Supreme) 7/1 from 11/1
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Manlaga (Juvenile Handicap) 9/2 from 7/1
Plus! The top three most backed horses today.
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Old Park Star – 34% of Supreme bets
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Kopek Des Bordes – 40% of Arkle bets (Lulamba 35%)
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Lossiemouth – 34% of Champion Hurdle bets
Leader D’Allier is a non-runner in the first race, the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, scheduled for 1.20pm.
Luke McLaughlin
Morning everyone, and thank you Greg for that comprehensive introduction. Exciting times.
Let’s take a look at the day one preview, written by none other than Greg Wood:
Preamble
Greg Wood
Top of the morning from Cheltenham racecourse on day one of the 2026 festival. Oh, the places we’ll go over the next four afternoons, as the National Hunt season reaches a crescendo with 13 Grade One races, 13 handicaps with a depth of competitiveness that all but defies rational analysis, and a couple of Grade Twos that are a chance to take a breath.
This is a day that never loses its giddy, stomach-churning excitement, and I say that from experience as someone who has not missed an opening day at Cheltenham since my first in 1990, when Kribensis and Richard Dunwoody won the Champion Hurdle at the memorable odds of 95-40. The running order has changed down the years (along with the number of races and days at the meeting), but the tingle as the field walks toward the tape before the Supreme Novice Hurdle is, for me, up there with the finest moments in all of sport.
On the track, there are serious hopes that British stables will stage a revival after a decade of annual pummelling at the hands of the Irish. It did not occur to me at the time, but for what it is, or more probably is not, worth, I put up six British-trained horses and only one from Ireland in the tips for the opening day. The result that might get racing onto the front pages, meanwhile, would be a win for Harry Redknapp’s The Jukebox Man in Friday’s Gold Cup.
Off the track, meanwhile, the daily attendance figures will be closely studied for evidence that Cheltenham’s extensive range of schemes and innovations to tempt customers back to the track have started to have some effect. The festival is the biggest meeting of the year bar none, and four straight years of falling attendance would be bitterly disappointing not just for the track, but the sport as a whole.
One key indicator that seems sure to be up (or, if you are being pedantic, down) is the number of odds-on shots over the week, a sign of the depth of competition overall. There have been seven odds-on chances in each of the last two seasons, but there are only four in the current lists and that can only be a positive for the betting turnover.
There is certainly no lack of competition in today’s seven races, which include three handicap chases and the Fred Winter Handicap Hurdle, frequently the most impenetrably tricky event of the week. Race-by-race previews will be here throughout the afternoon, along with all the news, views, results, betting and gambles, as the 2026 Cheltenham festival finally gets under way.
