Rowleyfile Preview: 2019 Punchestown Festival

I have reached the age at which I find myself watching documentaries in the small hours of the morning when once I might have been night-clubbing. In particular, re-runs of “The World At War” – the award-winning 1970s series covering the Second World War – have preoccupied me of late more than is perhaps healthy.

They provide a “warning from history”, and we could all do with one of them from time to time, if not necessarily at 1:37 in the morning.

Horseracing is full of such warnings, which nonetheless go unheeded nearly as often as those from our communal past. That is something worth bearing in mind with this year’s Punchestown Festival.

While not a “Graveyard of Champions” – a term applied to Court 2 at Wimbledon as well as to racing at Saratoga, I discovered – Punchestown has seen a fair few big reputations come a cropper over the years, including from horses who had recently won at the Cheltenham Festival.  

If you don’t believe me, then have a look at this list of winners at Cheltenham this century that were odds-on losers at Punchestown just a few weeks later.

Dear old Moscow Flyer crops up twice, both times in the 2m Champion Chase, a race which also “claimed” Vautour and Un de Sceaux more recently.

There has been at least one odds-on loser from Cheltenham winners turning up, directly or indirectly, at Punchestown in each of the last five years. And, yes, Don Poli really did go off at 4 to 9 before finishing last of five in 2015, one of his livelier efforts judged by more recent events.

Cherry-picked stats can give a misleading impression, of course, not that many seem to have learnt that particularly lesson from history. In order to get a fuller idea of how winners at Cheltenham fare when turning up a month or two later at Punchestown, we need to consider all such runners and how they performed compared to expectation.

To this end, I identified all qualifiers this century, their odds, and how they performed. These are the findings.

Not only has going directly from Cheltenham to Punchestown been three times more popular than going indirectly, via such as Aintree, it has resulted in a 38% strike-rate compared to a 26% one for the circuitous route.

There has been only one year this century – 2007 – when not a single Cheltenham winner has followed up at Punchestown, and only two tried then (remember that there was no Cheltenham Festival in 2001, due to Foot and Mouth).

The figures look healthier still when considering the odds at which the various horses went off. The best way to judge this, I believe, is to apply a variable stake which returns 100 points according to the horses’ Starting Prices. That way, “freak” wins do not skew results.

Despite some decidedly sticky patches, the overall figures are just a fractional loss overall, and that is at industry SP (Betfair SP did not exist before 2008). There was even a small profit for horses taking the direct route (+146.15 on stakes of 3853.85, or 3.8% profit on stakes).

Champagne Classic at 14/1 (directly) in 2017 and The Storyteller at 16/1 (via an unplaced effort at Fairyhouse) 12 months ago, made a difference to recent returns, but not unreasonably so. 

So, the “warning from history” is at least as much an encouragement, while not forgetting those occasional costly setbacks.

With entries available for the first three days of this year’s Punchestown Festival at the time of writing, there are several Cheltenham winners lining up to be winners, or losers, next week in County Kildare.

Klassical Dream (Herald Champion Novice Hurdle), Defi du Seuil and A Plus Tard (both Dooleys Insurance Group Novice Chase) are possibles for Tuesday.

Minella Indo (Irish Daily Mirror Novice Hurdle), Al Boum Photo (Coral Punchestown Gold Cup) and Croco Bay (Guinness Handicap Chase) are engaged on Wednesday.

And Croco Bay (2m Handicap Chase), Duc des Genievres and Defi du Seuil (Ryanair Novice Chase) have been entered on Thursday.

That is quite a Festival set-list, and almost worth forgetting about a brilliant Guineas Weekend at the end of it for a few days.

It might be a shock to rival past shocks if Klassical Dream or Duc des Genieveres – fast-time winners of the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle and the Arkle Chase respectively at Cheltenham – were to be turned over in their races. But the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Al Boum Photo may not even start favourite against the Aintree hero Kemboy in perhaps the showdown of the entire meeting.

That Coral Punchestown Gold Cup is due off at 6:05 on Wednesday, but the whole five days, finishing on Saturday, looks like providing a proper send-off to what has been a memorable jumps season.