Cheltenham Going

The poor weather currently sweeping the country has forced a string of meetings to be abandoned, meaning that it has been a relatively quiet time for the sport over the last few days.

Given the amount of rain we have endured recently, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the bookmakers have started betting on the going for the first day of the Festival, and nor is it a shock that soft and heavy ground have been all the rage with punters (soft is now 100/30 from 4/1 with Coral, and heavy 12/1 from 16/1).

If you cast you mind back to last year, though, it was equally wet if not wetter, and it seemed almost impossible to believe that the meeting would start on anything better than soft ground. However, the course drains so well now that a few rain free days in the run up to the Festival was all it took to dry the track out enormously.

The only way, therefore, that I can envisage there being soft ground on day one is for it to actually rain significantly in the days immediately preceding the big event. To a certain extent, what happens now, or even in February, is irrelevant.

The key to finding big price Cheltenham Festival winners in recent years, therefore, has been to look at horses who may have run moderately on their last few outings on soft ground during the winter, but who are likely to improve when encountering better conditions at Cheltenham in the spring.