Cheltenham handicapping system could give advantage to British stables

The nine handicaps at the Cheltenham Festival later this month may offer some hope for British stables to recover their shattered pride, after Martin Greenwood, Britain’s senior jumps handicapper, said on Tuesday that his team is doing what it can to ensure that the home team’s horses arrive at the meeting on competitive marks.

Irish-trained runners finished 7-2 in front in the Festival’s handicaps last year, when Ireland had a record breaking 23 winners in all from 28 races, despite fielding only a third of the runners in what are, in theory at least, the meeting’s most competitive events. The three previous seasons saw a 5-5 draw in the handicaps – one was dropped from the programme in 2021 – and a similar return at this year’s Festival, which opens on 15 March, would be a significant step forward.

Some of the British-trained runners at least may be aided by some tweaks to the handicapping system, which will see some Irish novices given a little more to carry than might have been the case in the past, and some older British-trained horses dropping down the weights more rapidly than before.

“It’s not necessarily pull the UK down and shove the Irish up,” Greenwood said, “because we’ve always taken a higher view of the Irish novices anyway. It’s not concentrated on Cheltenham or Aintree, it’s an organic thing that we’re trying to do over the year.

“We’ve got a lot of statistical evidence with a new IT set up, and we noticed a bulge in the 130/140 [rating] area compared to 10 years ago. We decided to try and remove it a bit and bring it back to where it was by dropping the older, more exposed horses a bit quicker.

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