I Bloody Love Spring

3/3/26

With less than a week to the Cheltenham Festival, looking at the ten-day forecast I would say that we might be in for a dry four days so could there even be some watering towards the back end of next week? With some rain forecast in the next six days, I am working on the opening day being Good to Soft (Soft in places) to maintain where it currently stands.

I won’t be attending this year, instead I have booked myself into a Center Parcs cabin for some peace and quiet on my own to take it all in and work on the daily Race Previews with early starts. Then it’s Champions League and the Players’ Championship in the evening so a sporting bonanza with plenty of English Breakfasts, throughout-the-day grazing and evening comfort meals. All the stuff I don’t get at home, basically!

I usually put up somewhere in the region of 35-40 bets for Cheltenham (some of which will be stakes returned taking advantage of the NRNB concession) of which over half are ante-post so, with 22 in so far, there will be plenty of on-the-day recommendations when all the evidence is at hand. The daily Race Previews will be uploaded at approximately 6pm for Days 2, 3 and 4. The Day 1 preview will be uploaded on Monday morning before I set off for Woburn.

Overall, we are in pretty good overall position with just one non-runner before the insurance of NRNB came in and are nicely ahead of the market with most of the recommendations so hopefully a couple or more can land at tasty ante-post odds and extend the LSP of 161pts to advised prices since I began the weekly Cheltenham Service 20 years ago.

In terms of Cheltenham Preview Evenings it’s two down and three (maybe four) to go up and down the country and I’ve also been listening to and watching plenty of online versions and podcasts, hoping to stumble on that one nugget per event that catches my imagination so I have not been short on listening to opinions to add to my own. Nothing to be said about the Grade 1 races from now on is likely to shift my view on those so it’s the handicaps that are currently my big focus.

In terms of the quality of the racing next week, it’s a shame to lose star names like Constitution Hill, Sir Gino and Marine Nationale in recent weeks plus the Triumph Hurdle favourite, Narciso Has, but that’s always going to happen. Despite this, it feels like the Festival buzz is back with the changes to the race programme leading to more competitive races (maybe there will be just one odds-on fav this year in Majborough dependent on where Lossiemouth goes?) and the novice races over hurdles and fences look particularly engaging this Cheltenham Festival.

We also have the most open Gold Cup for a long while to look forward to with the home team having four live contenders in a bid to end the seven-year winning run of the Irish and this year’s running is comfortably the best running so far of the Mares’ Chase.

Once Cheltenham is over, off the back of writing Fifty Years In The Betting Jungle a year ago with Gary Wiltshire which was well received (circa 1300 copies sold), I’ll be working on a new project writing the memoirs of Alan ‘Ginger’ Newman who was a greyhound bookmaker at the London tracks for over 50 years so he has some very interesting tales to tell! As it will be available from Weatherbys Shop website in June, I need to get a shift on. Alan is long retired now and a big pal of Michael Tabor going back to the halcyon days of big crowds at dog racing and betting to match, so he spends much of his time touring the world on his private jet with the rest of the Coolmore team for big international meetings (often seen by his side in the winners’ enclosure for trophy presentations) so he has some tales to tell from those experiences as well.

What else for March? All the Eurovision entries will be in soon and I am continuing to cover those in the weekly Sunday Supplement column. Finland is the best entry of the 22 in so far but I’m holding out for something potentially better from the remaining dozen. If not, then it’s a bad year.

The Players’ Championship is the big golf tournament before The Masters and begins on the Thursday of Cheltenham so I’ll give a couple of names I will be backing in the General Sports column this weekend.

Looking a little further ahead, name dropper that I am, Kyren Wilson conducted the raffle at my Cheltenham Preview Evening last night so I took the opportunity to ask the recent Masters champ how he is feeling ahead of trying to wrest back the World Snooker Championship that he won in 2024? Unsurprisingly, he was bullish but admitted to being the most nervous that he has ever been for any match with the pressure of defending his title last year when he was knocked out in the first round like so many first-time World Champions, or the ‘Curse of the Crucible’ as it is referred.

So, will the 9/2 joint-favourite, Zhao Xintong, suffer the same fate as so many before him when the event starts next month? Wilson won’t have that weighing on his shoulders this time and is champing at the bit for Sheffield and you can get 10/1. I’ve had a few quid on already.