The doctor has scribbled his hurried prescription for a better Cheltenham Festival.
The Mares’ Hurdle, the Mares’ Chase and Mares’ Novice Hurdle should be converted into 0-150 mares-only handicaps (a lower bracket for novices). It’s a good idea at first glance. Have your best 150 plus mares compete in the marquee races with a 7 lb pound allowance. Create competitiveness through the magic of the handicapping system for all the remaining mares below the top rung.
However, it’s like trying to fix the competitiveness of the Six Nations by sending the champions (let’s face it: Ireland) to play South Africa and the All Blacks in the Rugby Championship and giving Italy a head start each year against the rest. It will make it more competitive sure, but it won’t make it better.
For those who already have the Mares’ programme tattooed on their chest, you can skip the history lesson in this paragraph. Back in the day, National Hunt fillies were not sent into training. Breeders would retain them unraced or sell them for pennies on the pound. This led to us breeding from horses that were slow (but of course we didn’t know that) and challenged jumps breeders’ efforts to make their enterprise pay. The race planners tackled this problem by introducing a mares’ allowance of 7 lbs and a significant investment in prize money for mares-only races. This was further reinforced by significant financial bonuses for racing mares created by the TBA and ITBA (which our own syndicate love targeting today). These changes have seen the numbers of mares in training flourish to unprecedented levels. Our syndicate has been proud to be part of that movement by investing and nurturing National Hunt mares.
Syndicates.Racing in the Irish Field
You see, in order to breed more talented, faster, sounder horses we need to find out who the best horses are in each generation. While longer term I would support a move away from black type (subscribe and you will 100% get a Tuesday Take rant on this topic in due course), as we stand today, the value of a horse’s pedigree is derived from the back type in it’s pedigree. By removing these championship races for mares, our ability to decipher who the best mares in any particular year when viewing a catalogue are immediately challenged. You could try to replicate these races at other festivals but that just wouldn’t work – the Queen Mary would never work at Chester’s May Meeting.
While Twitter’s doom and gloom merchants would have you believe otherwise, at Syndicates.Racing we have never experienced such demand for our jumps mares – each of them is selling out in record time. It’s actually taken me by surprise – I thought it would be Cheltenham before the majority sold out. However, (now whisper it please dear reader), it might be because the jumps mares’ programme is exactly what is thriving within our great jumps game.
3 of the last 4 winners of the Champion Hurdle have been mares. The race brimming with the most potential stars of the whole Cheltenham week might just be the Mares’ Novice Hurdle. Lossiemouth is one of the most exciting horses in training. Mares are the ever-increasing back bone of what’s making jumps racing so exciting.
We have a community WhatsApp group (which you can join too here) which allows us to stay in touch with our owners worldwide while only allowing us to post in the group (nobody can see your phone number or how you vote either for privacy). We post news, insights and sometimes we get our community’s views on important topics. So, we asked over 500 current jumps mare owners what would they like to see done about it:
I agree. I think we worship a false god when we think competitiveness should be our only pursuit. Some of my favourite Cheltenham memories have been deeply uncompetitive – Master Minded in his first Champion Chase, Constitution Hill in the Supreme Novice, Vautour in the JLT. Splendid isolation can be quite splendid.
The reality is that if we continue to protect and invest in the mares’ program something magic will happen – the best mares in each generation will flourish, they will breed better horses and we will have more brilliant champions to discover. If we didn’t have a robust mares program we wouldn’t have Constitution Hill. His dam Queen of the Stage showed her talent on the track attaining black type through the mares’ program and so was deemed talented enough to go to Blue Bresil.
This plea to keep hands off our mares races may be the ruination of our Cheltenham dream. We have been third in the Mares’ Novice hurdle, we’ve been one of the favourites for the Mares’ Hurdle before injury and we’ve had a runner in the Mares’ Chase – but it’s irrefutable, we’d have a better chance of winning these races if they were handicaps. However, I also want to win the Masters. That doesn’t mean Rory McIlroy should give me shots to make it more competitive.
So then a failure to act – doctors differ and patients die? No. Studies show that the end of humanity will more likely come from collapsed birth rates than from climate change. We’re seeing a problem and trying to solve it by sacrificing our future’s most important resource, selection of the best of the best.
My prescription for the short term tinkerers then? Breathe in, breathe out. Let the breed win out.
P.S – We had a big reaction to last week’s Tuesday Take on buying your first mare, if you missed it and would like to give it a read you can do so here.
Fancy your own piece of Cheltenham Mare Magic?
The most frequent winners of the Mares’ Hurdle at Cheltenham are Willie Mullins and Henry De Bromhead. When we think about how we allocate any jumps mare, the trainer is of huge importance – they need to understand what makes a good mare tick and how to place them to best effect. Willie and Henry put the ball in the back of the net time and time again with mares. That’s why to give you an experience with both trainers we’ve packaged them together in the run up to Cheltenham for some Cheltenham Mare Magic.
These two mares have already got Cheltenham connections, our Waldpark filly heading to Henry is a sister to Grade 1 winning Adagio, second in the Triumph Hurdle in 2021 and our Jeu St Eloi filly was the only filly sold by her sire last year before exploding on to the scene with runners this year including second favourite for the Triumph Hurdle Kargese (also trained by Willie Mullins), winner at the Dublin Racing Festival.
We have invested in thorough educations for both – our Waldpark filly has been broken, pre-trained and schooled by Donie Murphy and our Jeu St Eloi filly has been under the care of Sonny Carey. They both now will soon return to pre-training before giving bundles of fun with two of the best trainers in the business.
These are our last two National Hunt mares available on our website, everything else is sold out. A 2.5% share in both fillies is just €2,795 with quarterly fees of €475 starting on 1 March 2024. There’s no reason they are last to sell (one of our slowest horses ever to sell out ended up third in the Mares Novice Hurdle at Cheltenham) and who knows taking the plunge today could see you back at the Mares’s Hurdle in years to come when it’s hopefully still not a handicap. You can also take a share larger or smaller shares in each filly individually by clicking here for our Waldpark filly and here for our Jeu St Eloi.
The doctor could prescribe no better medicine than these two jumps mares to start dreaming about.