Less is more?

Among the changes to the Cheltenham Festival programme revealed by The Jockey Club earlier this week, much the most important – and potentially the most beneficial – was the halving of the number of level-weights graded novice chases from four to two.

Both the Grade 1 Golden Miller Novices’ Chase over two and a half miles, latterly run as the Turners, and the Grade 2 National Hunt Novices’ Chase over three and three-quarter miles, are to be run as novice handicaps in 2025. The Golden Miller becomes a Grade 2 limited handicap, while the National Hunt Chase becomes a class 2 handicap with a ratings ceiling of 145. The other big change to the National Hunt Chase is that it will no longer be confined to amateur riders.

That leaves the Cheltenham Festival, as was long the case in the past, with two clearly defined Grade 1 championship novice chases catering for two distinct groups in the novice chase population; the Arkle over two miles and the Broadway, currently sponsored as the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase, over three. The Festival programme this century had become bloated with competing opportunities for the best of the season’s novice chasers and the move to offering a simple choice between options over two miles or three looks a definite case of ‘less being more.’

The Golden Miller – run under various sponsorships during its short history as the Jewson, JLT, Marsh and Turners – was added to the Cheltenham Festival, initially as a Grade 2 contest, as an intermediate alternative for novices who might find the Arkle a bit too sharp or the Broadway a bit too far.

The average field size for the Golden Miller in its fourteen editions is 9.4 which puts it, appropriately enough, about midway between the Arkle (8.7) and the Broadway (9.9) by that measure. But there has been plenty of evidence in recent seasons that the ‘jam’ of top novice chasers has been spread a little too thinly when there were three Grade 1 races open to them at Cheltenham.

For example, the four runners who contested the Golden Miller in 2022 made it the smallest Festival field in decades, a race which will also be remembered for the last-fence fall of subsequent dual Gold Cup winner Galopin des Champs when looking the certain winner. In the same recent period, the Arkle has twice attracted just five runners, in 2018 and 2021, while only six runners contested the Broadway in 2021 and again last March.

It’s interesting to look at the average field sizes of the Arkle and Broadway (or Sun Alliance/RSA as it was long known) before the Golden Miller was sandwiched between them as the ‘Goldilocks’ option. Taking the fourteen runnings between 1996 and 2010 (there was no Festival in 2001), the Arkle attracted an average field size of 13.8 and the Broadway 12.4. In the same period, both races had a minimum of nine runners and a maximum of nineteen.

Field sizes at the Festival in general have fallen – the average in 2024 was the lowest since the meeting reached its current total of 28 races for the first time in 2016 – but it’s hard to imagine the introduction of the Golden Miller hasn’t had some sort of impact on the two longer-established Grade 1 novice events.

The Broadway has been vulnerable to attack on two fronts, not just losing potential runners to the shorter Golden Miller, but also to the longer National Hunt Chase. Far from being a recent edition to the Festival programme, the National Hunt Chase, first run in 1860, was the race around which the whole ‘National Hunt Meeting’ – later to become the Cheltenham Festival – was centred.

Later superseded in prestige and value by the Gold Cup which celebrated its centenary this year, the National Hunt Chase nonetheless remained in its traditional form into the twenty-first century, being a four-mile contest for amateur riders and restricted to horses which had not won a race of any description, except for certain hunter chases, before the start of the current season.

The latter condition obviously kept the standard of runner low, but in a bid to make the National Hunt Chase a bit less of an anachronism and raise the quality of the race, winners over hurdles were admitted from 2002 when Rith Dubh, who’d won two such races in Ireland, as well as a bumper, was successful. Further steps took the National Hunt Chase from being the eccentric elderly relative in the Festival family towards becoming an event more in keeping with the modern Festival as it gained listed status in 2014 and became a Grade 2 in 2017.

Evidence of the race’s better-quality participants came from the likes of 2016 runner-up Native River, who went on to win the Gold Cup two years later, while the 2017 National Hunt Chase winner Tiger Roll was to win two Grand Nationals.

Job for the professionals

But for all the increases in quality and prize money which narrowed the gap between the National Hunt Chase and the Broadway/RSA (Native River beat that year’s RSA winner Blaklion into third when they met at Aintree the following month), the unique conditions of the ‘four-miler’ made it a potential liability in an increasingly welfare-conscious climate. Matters came to a head after the 2019 renewal when only four of the eighteen starters completed the race, the rider of the third (beaten 47 lengths behind the first two) and two others who fell late on all receiving bans for persevering on tired horses.

A reduction of the race’s distance by a couple of furlongs and other measures tightening up the qualification of runners were promptly brought in, but with a field of only six runners in 2022, four finishers again in 2023 and seven runners contesting the latest renewal of the National Hunt Chase, it was becoming increasingly evident that its days were numbered in its current form.

The top amateur riders are going to be the main losers in the changes that have been announced – between them Jamie Codd, Derek O’Connor and Patrick Mullins have won eight of the last ten renewals of the National Hunt Chase – though there was a glimpse of the race’s future during the pandemic when Jack Kennedy won the 2021 edition on Galvin at a time when only professional jockeys were allowed to compete.

Helping hand for long-range punters

A novice handicap will therefore be a new format for the National Hunt Chase but a two and a half mile novice handicap, which the Golden Miller will become, was part of the Festival under a number of different sponsors’ names between 2005 and 2020.

The race never failed to draw a maximum or near-maximum field of twenty, with competition for a place in the line-up so hot that the difference between top and bottom weight was 7 lb at most for some of the more recent renewals. A ratings ceiling of 140 was brought in to avoid conflict with the Golden Miller when that race was introduced in 2011, with the limit raised to 145 in 2018. The stand-out winner was the five-year-old A Plus Tard, successful by sixteen lengths in 2019, giving Rachael Blackmore her first Festival winner three years before the same partnership won the Gold Cup.

It was the novices’ handicap chase which was sacrificed to make way for the new Mares’ Chase in 2021. Technically, it wasn’t lost altogether as it was moved to the previous Saturday’s Imperial Cup card though it has obviously not enjoyed the same profile there.

Will everyone welcome the latest changes to the Festival’s novice chase programme? Inevitably not, as any steps to make racing more competitive will meet with some pushback by those with a vested interest in keeping things as they are.

But among the broader benefits of the changes will be a bit more clarity in the ante-post markets. Punters will have less second guessing to do when it comes to Festival targets for the top novices and running plans should be less prone to options being kept open as late as possible or unexpected late changes of mind about who is running where.

The potential benefits are not confined to the Cheltenham Festival either. For those novices not catered for by the new Festival programme, there are always the Grade 1 options over two and a half miles in the spring of the WillowWarm Gold Cup at Fairyhouse’s Easter meeting – a race won by both of Willie Mullin’s dual Gold Cup winners Al Boum Photo and Galopin des Champs – or the Manifesto Novices’ Chase at Aintree. The fields for both contests could be all the stronger without a competing race of the same type at Cheltenham.

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