Cheltenham – Pertemps Final Handicap Hurdle
This race has proved a real conundrum over the years and the official handicapper usually sets a real puzzle. For my money this is one of the hardest races to solve at the entire Cheltenham Festival. To be eligible to run in this race all the runners have to have done is to have competed in one of the qualifiers around Britain and Ireland – while those races do provide some clues, a lot of them are run under very different conditions to the Final itself and only one of the qualifiers is run here at Cheltenham.
There has been no single-figure priced winner for the past seven seasons and those include a couple of 50/1 chances and we have to travel back to 2003 to find the last winning favourite – Inching Closer who was 6/1 in the Cheltenham racing betting.
Although Buena Vista (16/1) was the winner last year for David Pipe and he didn’t have winning form coming into the race, there have been plenty of previous occasions that a contender with a winning profile last time out took this race. That should be mentioned as those winning a race last time out don’t usually make up a huge percentage of the Pertemps field and they outperform their average by a substantial margin.
In with all the Cheltenham betting offers we have to examine the Irish challenge and although there are only two qualifiers run in Ireland the Irish appear to be performing slightly above themselves in this race although you have to go back to 2006 for their last winner Kadoun was one of those aforementioned 50/1 scorers – but they have won five of the last 18 runnings and that 50/1 scorer Kadoun led home a 1-2-3 for the Emerald Isle.
There is no doubt that this is a tough race to solve but it could be made easier by ignoring any five year olds in the field as they have only struck on one occasion and by making sure that your selection definitely stays the trip with 13 of the last 18 winners having previously having had winning form over 3 miles.
The Pertemps Final Handicap Hurdle probably ranks as one of the more difficult events of the four days – full marks if you solve it.
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