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Odd how you were just as likely to see a Champion Hurdler winner or placed horses emerge from the Sun Alliance/Neptune/Ballymore Hurdle with the likes of Istabraq, French Holly, Hardy Eustace, Peddlers Cross, The New One & Faugheen all winning their respective race as a novice and then going on to win or get placed in a Champion Hurdle.
There are also cases where a top trainer has the best hurdlers or reigning champions and decides to split horse up with Faugheen/Vautour immediately springing to mind, I remember being dumbstruck that Faugheen (who was a 3m point to point winner and warmed up for the Neptune by winning over 3m on heavy ground and looked every inch a Gold Cup horse of the future) wasn’t sent chasing with Vautour being targeted at the Champion Hurdle.
Had the likes of Vautour, Douvan & Altior been trained elsewhere and all stayed over hurdles they all had great chances of winning a Champion Hurdle but Douvan was in the same ownership as Faugheen/Annie Power (who ended up deputising for an injured defending champion Faugheen) so it was a bit of a no brainer to send him chasing.
Hendo already had Buveur d’Air as his Champion Hurdle candidate (he went on to win back to back renewals) and as such he was looking to maximise his chances of winner G1 races elsewhere by sending Altior chasing (hindsight is a great thing but it worked out well in the end in that particular case).
Personally, I think the Champion Hurdle has hit a bit of a lull since Annie Power’s win in 2016 but that maybe more down to a lack of good rivals or seeing the usual suspects (that have been put in their place previously) running year in year out – new blood is needed and that is why Appreciate It badly needs to turn up on the day and hopefully Willie is able to have him cherry ripe to at least pose a new challenge for Honeysuckle.
Irony is that hurdling is very much an after thought for Appreciate It as he looks every inch a chaser and the plan was to put off chasing for a year due to the injury that delayed his return but potentially him running in the Champion Hurdle and winning it could put the proverbial spanner in the works for that plan.
“Hendo already had Buveur d’Air as his Champion Hurdle candidate.”
But he actually started out novice chasing, a sphere in which he remains unbeaten.
He won a novice Chase at Haydock in mid December 2016. He then followed up at Warwick on New Year’s Eve.
Connections then decided to put his chase career on hold. He won the Contenders Hurdle at Sandown before winning the Champion Hurdle, in which Yanworth started favourite.
Buveur d’Air has never jumped a fence in public since.
I remember being at Newbury one day and fancying a horse called Barters Hill as value at 10/1 in the concluding bumper as it was a previous winner.
“It’s up against a couple of Henderson unexposed ones, but they’re not necessarily much good,” I reasoned.
Barters Hill won and I felt very clever.
Years later, fancying a smug nostalgia fest, I looked up the race on the RP database.
The pair who weren’t “necessarily much good” turned out to be Altior and Buveur D’Air!
I think I might just have got a bit lucky there!
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"I think you may well be guilty of letting nostalgia cloud your judgement a little Ian. Faugheen, Hurricane Fly, Annie Power, as Befair rightly says are well up to scratch. Its the depth which is waning over very recent years – and as others have touched on above, I think I’m coming to the conclusion its because the top horses are all with the same trainers. Matches my dullard statistics from earlier in the thread too.
The mid noughties had a very strong and deep (mainly Irish) 2m Hurdle band in my opinion. Macs Joy, Back in Front, Brave Inca, Hardy Eustace, Harchibald, Rhinestone Cowboy, Intersky Falcon, Al Eile, Rooster Booster, Solerina, Subliminty, Fethard Lady, and more I’ve forgotten I’m sure.
That was a very, very, good 2m hurdle era for my money. And it occurs to me now, that they were almost all with different trainers. Healthy for the game that was.
BUY THE SUN
I think what I’m always guilty of in these discussions is allowing Timeform’s historical ratings to cloud my judgement.
As others have rightly said, theirs is just another opinion, but I’d argue their methods, like the BHA Handicapper, are invariably sound as the numbers link the generations.
Faugheen was definitely an omission, but Hurricane Fly was one of those horses who gets labelled “great” because he won a lot of races without necessarily every beating anything really good by far.
And Annie Power was a mare getting 7lb – can’t have her as a Champion Hurdle “great” at all.
This thread is TRF at its best – many thanks to you and various others, particularly Cancello, for the ongoing fascinating insights.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Winning more than one Champion hurdle shouldn’t automatically qualify as a ‘Great’; it’s far too simplistic. What did they beat? Conversely, some horses may have only won one, and had issues after so couldn’t win more. For example Buveur d’Air has two, Alderbrook only one; but I know who I’d say was the better horse.
And I know it’s not the done thing, but I never got the whole Hurricane Fly ‘mania’. A world record number of Gd/Gp1 wins; yet he kept beating the same hapless horses in small fields year after year. Admirable, but not great in my view, but he was such a fighter….
Ah yes- the perennial debate about what constitutes “greatness”.
Was Best Mate a great? He won three Gold Cups, which is an outstanding accomplishment, but beat a bunch of second raters every time. Quite frankly, Timeform’s rating of 182 is a joke.
A similar case on the flat is Sea The Stars- amazing list of races won, but beat absolutely nothing. Nothing in his actual form merits anywhere near his Timeform rating of 140.
Long term readers may remember that I ran a thread called Then and Now, with weekly instalments comparing racing in 1990 with the same week in 2020. That was a project that died with the first lockdown and cancellation of racing. But I had already written some of the weekly piece about Cheltenham and there’s one thing from that which seems relevant to this debate.
In 1990, it was the norm for top flat stables to run a few horses over hurdles, to keep the horses active over the winter, to give the stable and staff some interest etc. In March 1990, the first three in the Champion Hurdle were trained by James Fanshawe (M Stoute officially), Barry Hills and James Hetherton.
And that was not unusual – two mile hurdling in the years around 1990, always had the odd horse from yards that were primarily concerned with flat racing. Guy Harwood was one, mainly I suspect because he had jump jockeys Chris Kinane amd Mark Perrett riding work for him. Fulke Johnson Houghton trained a Champion Hurdle horse called Ruling, who ended up over hurdles because he wouldn’t go into the stalls on the flat. Ian Balding often had a good hurdler and found a real star in Crystal Spirit, who won the Sun Alliance Hurdle and went on to be a top class 3M chaser.
The current generation of the Balding, Harwood (now Perrett) and Hills families don’t produce hurdlers and even James Fanshawe has pretty much given up on the game, his last decent NH horse being Reveillez, the terror of the bookies in the run up to Cheltenham sixteen years ago.
It’s an interesting discussion; can you achieve great accomplishments without being a great? Best Mate is a case in point, I think. 3 Gold Cups is incredible – a great achievement; but it’s not an automatic pass to being classed as a great. Desert Orchid only won one Gold Cup, however his other achievements over different trips, weights, longevity, etc qualify him for greatness.
Similarly there are World Class sportsmen/women, and others who occasionally produce a World Class performance. The difference is the former consistently produce, the latter only sporadically.
apracing: I look back on that era with great fondness. Harwood, Stoute, Balding, Fanshawe, Hills all having Cheltenham Festival winners. Hannon Sr even had a Gd1 double in December 1991 with Gran Alba (Christmas Hurdle) then Lift and Load winning the Challow a few days later.
The ‘flat race’ finish of the 1990 Champion Hurdle, then the 1992 Champion & Stayers Hurdles won by the same flat connections.I always thought it added something to the sport; but I always got the feeling the NH diehards weren’t too happy about it. Much as I love jumping, it’s not half parochial at times…..
Not sure I’d describe the likes of Our Connor, Jezki, Solwhit as “hapless” mind…
BUY THE SUN
“the perennial debate about what constitutes “greatness”.””
It’s a great question about a great subject!
Actually – and this might surprise some – I agree with what Alice (Fox-Pitt) Plunkett once said on the subject: “Winx is my all-time greatest Flat horse. I don’t care about ratings, that’s your criteria, not mine. I care about toughness, soundness, durability, and Winx passes all my personal tests for greatness. Ditto my all-time greatest jumper, Cue Card. Never mind the ratings, he won so many races over so many years at so many distances and was so sound.”
It’s fair comment from the lady IMO.
Greatness is a subject where you can never tell anyone they are “wrong” about because everyone is entitled to their own criteria.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Picking up on the winning a couple of Champion Hurdles doesn’t automatically class you as a ‘great’ and maybe I am in the minority (deep breath and preparing to get blasted by a fair few for this) but I never thought Istabraq was as good as most think and his rating suggests and in no way should he be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of a Night Nurse/Monksfield/Sea Pigeon and a few others – the fact that he is rated 180, the equal of Monksfield (only 2lbs behind the highest rated Night Nurse) and 5lbs superior to Sea Pigeon is utterly laughable.
In two of his Champion Hurdles he beat the mighty Theatreworld who for his hurdling career was 6 wins from 33 total starts and couldn’t actually manage to win any hurdle races afterward his two runner up spots – yes in 2000 Istabraq beat subsequent 2002 Champion Hurdler Hors La Loi III but after he became champion he ran 10 subsequent races spread over the following 3 years (which included being thumped 22L by Intersky Falcon in the 2002 Christmas Hurdle) with his solitary win being in a Taunton novice chase in 2005…….
Full disclosure, Sea Pigeon is my favourite NH horse of all time and whilst I may see him through somewhat rose tinted glasses, I can’t see any of Istabraq’s form matching his and that is before you take into account the huge weight carrying performances The Pigeon put up in ‘gasp’ handicaps of all things.
I am not saying Istabraq wasn’t a great horse but his form doesn’t in my opinion entitle him to hold the lofty position he does when discussing the all time greatest hurdlers.
“Similarly there are World Class sportsmen/women, and others who occasionally produce a World Class performance. The difference is the former consistently produce, the latter only sporadically.”
One curiosity is Andy North, the American golfer. He only ever won three tournaments in his career. Two of them were US Opens.
Was he a great golfer? Some would say no. But he had the skills and held his nerve to win not once but twice at the highest level.
By the criteria of majors, that makes North the equal of Greg Norman. Anyone who ever saw Norman play knows he was in a different league in terms of ability – but was his mental strength as good?
There are plenty of players who have won one major. Colin Montgomerie and Lee Westwood (to name just two) never have despite winning multiple tournaments. Who should be considered better?
Agree about Istabraq and Hurricane Fly. I believe their ratings are too high.
Alderbrook should have won a second Champion Hurdle but in my opinion was given a poor ride by Richard Dunwoody. Collier Bay should not have been anywhere near him.
He made no mistake a few weeks later when bolting up in the Scottish Champion Hurdle, putting in one of the best jumping rounds I have ever seen. Low, fast and accurate.
He won in 1995 as a novice, easily defeating Relkeel and Danoli in only his third start over hurdles.
Unfortunately he would never go hurdling today, which is the jumping game’s loss. I believe he is the most underrated of the modern champions and would have beaten Istabraq and Hurricane Fly.
CAS- Alderbrook beat Large Action, not Relkeel. Sadly, The Brig’s grey never made the Champion Hurdle lineup at his peak.
Agree with LD that Istabraq was overrated. Happens quite often with horses who win prestigious races on more than one occasion- as mentioned, Best Mate and Sea The Stars are other examples.
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