Which jockey holds the record for the highest number of Cheltenham Festival winners in a single year?

The jockey who holds the record for the highest number of Cheltenham Festival winners in a single year is Rupert ‘Ruby’ Walsh. Walsh retired from the saddle on May 1, 2019, just two weeks shy of his fortieth birthday but, by the end of his career, had ridden a total of 59 Cheltenham Festival winners and become leading jockey at the Festival on 11 occasions between 2004 and 2017. Walsh rode his first Cheltenham Festival winner on Alexander Banquet in the Champion Bumper, as an 18-year-old amateur, in 1998 but, as a professional, rode seven winners over the four days of the Festival not once, but twice.

His first record-breaking haul came in 2009, when his notable winners included Master Minded in the Queen Mother Champion Chase, Big Buck’s in the World Hurdle, now the Stayers’ Hurdle, and Kauto Star in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, all for Paul Nicholls. Of course, Walsh and Nicholls parted company in 2013, with Walsh choosing to concentrate on riding for Irish champion trainer Willie Mullins. However, the end of one of the most successful partnerships in the history of National Hunt racing did Walsh little harm as far as the Cheltenham Festival was concerned. Indeed, in 2016, Walsh equalled his own record by riding seven winners, all trained by Mullins, at the Festival. Notable winners that year included Douvan in the Arkle Challenge Trophy, Annie Power in the Champion Hurdle and the ill-fated Vautour in the Ryanair Chase.

Has a horse race ever resulted in a triple dead-heat?

In horse racing, a dead-heat – where two, or more, horses cannot be separated, not even by a high resolution photo finish camera – is a rare occurrence. Nevertheless, dead-heats do happen and, while hardly commonplace, triple dead heats are not unknown. In Britain, all the triple dead-heats and, believe it or not, a few quadruple dead-heats, were recorded before the introduction of the photo-finish camera in 1947.

However, elsewhere in the world, several bona fide triple dead-heats have been captured in official photographs down the years. In the Carter Handicap at Aqueduct Racecourse, in New York City, in June 1944, for example, Brownie, Bossuet and Wait A Bit crossed the line in unison to record the first triple dead-heat in a stakes race. A dozen years later, in November, 1956, Ark Royal, Fighting Force and Pandie Sun did likewise in the Hotham Handicap at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne. Even as recently as April, 2014, in an otherwise nondescript maiden claiming race at Evangeline Downs, in Louisiana, All In The Art, Chessie Slew, and Memories Of Trina all hit the finishing line simultaneously.

What is Dutching?

Dutching is contraction of ‘Dutch betting’ and describes a betting technique that involves backing two or more selections in the same race. If the odds on each selection are exactly the same, the stake is split, equally, between or among them. If not, the stake is split proportionally, according to the implied probability of each selection winning – that is, horses at shorter odds carry correspondingly higher stakes, and vice versa – so the return is the same, regardless of which selection wins. Of course, Dutching isn’t foolproof; backing two or more horses in a race increases your chances of a return, but if none of your selections wins you lose your entire stake.

Bear in mind, too, that backing two horses in a race, by placing the same stake on each, not only doubles the outlay, but greatly reduces the overall odds. A winner at 2/1, for example, requires an outlay of two points to produce a return of three points – or, in other words, a net profit of one point – so it is easy to see that the true, ‘coupled’ odds are 1/2. Similarly, backing two horses at 3/1 produces collective odds of 1/1, or evens, and so on.

Why are race distances measured in furlongs?

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a furlong is an old English unit of length. The term is, in fact, derived from the old English words ‘fuhr’, meaning ‘furrow’, and ‘lang’, meaning ‘long’; in the traditional medieval farming system in England, known as the ‘open-field’ system, each ploughed furrow ran the length of an acre. The furlong was standardised to 660 feet or 220 yards – that is, one-eighth of a mile – in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century and has been the traditional unit of measurement for British horse races since the first formal race meetings in the sixteenth century.

The furlong remained an official measurement until the Eighties but, today, is used almost exclusively in horse racing; indeed, to the layman, the furlong is probably the distance most associated with the sport. That said, aside from the fact that British racecourses are geared up to use furlongs, in terms of marker posts and the like, there is no real reason why race distances cannot be measured in metres, as they are elsewhere in Europe. However, the British racing industry is notoriously traditional and tests of distance markers in furlongs and metres have received, at best, a lukewarm reception.

1 … 152 153 154 155 156 … 173