Is Constitution Hill the safest bet at the Cheltenham Festival 2023?
The only thing you can guarantee at the Cheltenham Festival is even the surest thing can leave you red-faced - and in the red. The history of this place is littered with stories of hope and expectation that were rewritten at the not so lucky last.
It's eight years since Annie Power - the jolliest of jollies - arrived at the final fence with daylight between her and rivals, primed to deliver the bookies a bashing. Her name was etched on everyone's accumulators, her jockey, Ruby Walsh, had already delivered two legs of a treble that oddsmakers feared would cost them £50 million.
Her rivals distant in her rear view mirror, Annie Power, who'd won 11 of her previous 12 starts, duly dumped a disbelieving Walsh on the turf to a groan audible from across the Irish Sea.
Nicky Henderson hopes history will be a little kinder to the unbeaten Constitution Hill, the odds-on favourite for the Unibet Champion Hurdle. For many, he's the best in training and already been talked up as the racehorse of a generation.
But since the turn of the century, only 50% of favourites have won Tuesday's opening day showpiece. Constitution Hill is the standard bearer of the home team at Cheltenham, Irish horses having won 41 of the 56 Festival races in the last two years.
His groom Jaydon Lee waxes lyrical about his 'special dude', labelling his jumping as 'bombproof', and jockey Nico de Boinville describes him as a 'machine'. Henderson - prone to get misty eyed and emotional when talking about his horses, even after 72 Cheltenham winners - hasn't tried to dampen the hype either.
“I have to say any clown could probably train this horse," he said. "He's just not complicated, he goes through the motions and all races are just the same to him. He is completely unflappable and he's just different gravy really.
"You wouldn’t pick him out in a crowd, he perhaps doesn't have that presence or swagger as some of the others. We can't forget that he is still only a very young horse that has had five races. Even with a horse like Constitution Hill, you can't be confident. Cheltenham is a battlefield."
Henderson has won the Champion Hurdle a record eight times, including twice with Buveur d'Air, but there's a school of thought his latest superstar could be the best yet. His win in last year's Supreme Novices' took your breath away and at just six years of age, there is already talk he could be in the same league as Istabraq, one of five to win the Champion Hurdle three times.
Henderson has spent over half his life in the winner's enclosure at Prestbury Park, picking up his first winner aged just 35 when See You Then stormed to the Champion Hurdle in 1985.
Nearly four decades later his passion for the game has not dimmed. His father Johnny was the aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Montgomery and played a key role in saving Cheltenham when the bulldozers threatened in the 1960s, a race at the Festival still named in his honour.
He didn't see the sport as a career for his eldest son, who was encouraged to join his city finance firm after leaving Eton with just the one A Level in French. It wasn't for him, Henderson recalling how he'd sit as his desk reading the The Sporting Life, studying form not stocks, with the outside pages of the Financial Times wrapped around his paper to avoid detection.
His friends and staff talk about his ferocious work ethic, up at six and still working hard 14 hours later. When he married his second wife three years ago, Henderson punctuated the day to follow the action at Kempton, where he landed five winners.
Father and son didn't have much in common in the world of business but they loved Cheltenham like its family.
"It's an extraordinary game, isn't it? I hear people talking about my chances but the best way to take the pressure off is to put it on someone else and the Irish trainers will be very hard to beat," said Henderson, quick to praise the horse boxes travelling over in the emerald green livery of Willie Mullins.
In recent years this meeting has been Mullins against the rest but Henderson has some hand on Tuesday. In addition to Constitution Hill, he has strong fancies Jonbon in the Sporting Life Arkle Trophy and Epatante in the Close Brothers Mares' Hurdle.
Trainers and jockeys talk about the stress of getting off the mark at Cheltenham, their shoulders visibly relaxing after banking a winner. Henderson boasts impressive day one statistics - he won on opening day in 11 of the previous 14 years, over half of his last 20 Festival winners have triumphed on Tuesday.
"This is always the most nervy time of year and it doesn't get any easier no matter how many times you've been through it but, currently, everything is tickety-boo," he reports, as the phone rings, again.
