Cheltenham Festival 2025: Three things we will learn on Friday
READY TO BOLT: Galopin Des Champs pictured in his stable at Willie Mullin's Closutton yard last month. Pic: Healy Racing
In the year 1819 there was a horse race run in the general Cheltenham area that was billed as the Gold Cup but the contest that we know, love and will watch raptly at 4PM this afternoon traces back as far as 1924. A five-year-old called Red Splash beat eight opponents to win £685 that day and so secured a place of honour unique in the history of horse racing.
The first multiple winners soon followed. Easter Hero won in 1929/30, and then the great Golden Miller won five on the bounce in the 1930s. Since then, only three horses have been sound and durable enough to complete the hat-trick: Cottage Rake, Arkle, and Best Mate.
Vincent O’Brien trained Cottage Rake to win three-consecutive Gold Cups from 1948-50 and so began of a series of National Hunt triumphs that loudly announced the arrival of the quiet man from North Cork and with him the foundation of the Ballydoyle empire and change in thinking in the global production of thoroughbreds.
Arkle will always just be Arkle, or Himself to those who knew him well. He harvested his hat-trick in the middle of the madness and mayhem of the 1960s and a mention of his name has the same wistful effect on racing enthusiasts as the Beatles on ageing teenyboppers or George Best on grey-haired football aficionados.
Best Mate came and went in the early years of the century without leaving as deep a hoof print, in Ireland at least, as the others. He didn’t run all that often and was minded lovingly and carefully, but the nervous eccentricities of his trainer, Henrietta Knight, always added gaiety to Festival week.
There are statues of Golden Miller, Arkle and Best Mate standing proud at Cheltenham racecourse and Cottage Rake has a prominent bar straddling the main grandstand named after him. But Cheltenham racecourse is a big place and there is plenty of space to erect even more monuments to greatness.
Greatness this afternoon carries a cumbersome gallic name and Galopin Des Champs will dominate the last day narrative. Had he been named in the English language the nine-year-old gelding would be known as ‘Child of the Fields,’ and it sounds even more poetic in Irish; Paiste Na Pairceanna. But a rose by any other name famously smells just as sweet and Galopin Des Champs has always been a very sweet and uncomplicated racehorse.
Bought from France as a four-year-old by his owners, the Turleys, in 2020, he had an inauspicious start to his career at Willie Mullin’s stable when beaten in his first three races over hurdles. It was his fourth race and first visit to Cheltenham that first told the tale. Ridden by Sean O’Keefe, he won the Martin Pipe Handicap Hurdle at the 2021 Festival off a rating of 142, which in retrospect made him the greatest certainty that ever faced a starting tape. Ever since then he has been hoovering up Grade One contests and banked over €2million euro in prizemoney for his lucky owners.
It's taken longer than it should have done but he has at last arrived into the warmth of public appreciation and the loud, loving and lasting reception he received when winning the Irish Gold Cup at the DRF in February will remain long in the memory of those who were there to witness it. If ever a horse was designed for Cheltenham, the jet black Galopin Des Champs is that beast. He loves a battle and comes alive when he meets a hill at the end of a three-mile chase. All being well, this afternoon he will find that hill, but will he find an opponent capable of offering a battle to tackle on its unforgiving rise?
There are races other than the Gold Cup at Cheltenham this afternoon. Six of them in fact, some of them top class, all of them interesting but none of them will deflect more than a shred of attention from the overriding question today. What can stop Galopin Des Champs?
Obstacles can impact him, obviously. Constitution Hill and State Man are topical examples of the danger involved when a racehorse leaves the ground at speed and Galopin’s only defeat at Cheltenham came when he slipped on landing after the last when a dozen lengths clear of yesterday’s Stayers Hurdle winner, Bob Olinger in the Turners Chase on St. Patricks Day in 2022. Other than that unfortunate accident he has been foot sure and flawless in all his races and hopefully will be again today.
So that just leaves eight opponents between him and a well-deserved statue. Banbridge is the only horse rated within a stone of the favourite and the only one that might have the ability and improvement trajectory to make a race of it. He collared Il Est Francais to win the King George at Kempton over Christmas, in what was a muddling contest. Inothewayurthinkin has been expensively supplemented into the race as a late entry last week having been originally targeted at the Aintree National. He finished a total of 6- lengths behind Galopin in three clashes this season and although he has been getting closer each time, he’s unlikely to show the necessary improvement to get much closer today.
Today is all about history. Sit back and watch the peerless Galopin Des Champs as he makes it.
