March Madness

8/3/25

Having been travelling up and down the land attending Cheltenham events over the last fortnight and listening to many a Chelto-based podcast back and forth whilst driving, the last of my ten(!) is tonight. So short and sweet this month.

I’m not quite Festival’d out before it starts but I will be having Sunday off having anything to do with Cheltenham before cracking on with my Day 1 column on Monday.

From an ante-post perspective we have some okay positions but no real proper standouts but no real duds either and just two losing bets due to NRs which is less than usual so I’d rather have the ante-post portfolio that we have entering the week than nothing at all. On average, I’d have about 35-40 bets over the 28 races so I’d say we’re looking at about 15 bets on the day during the week.

Fifty Years In The Betting Jungle by Gary Wiltshire (with myself) was published by Weatherbys seven days ago and is attracting good interest. Johnny Dineen in particular gave it a glowing mention after he read it and his post on X has now been seen over 64,000 times so we are obviously hoping that will have an effect on sales as well as that excellent general exposure. The book won’t start to be promoted properly until all the Cheltenham noise is out of the way. If you are at Cheltenham next week, go and see Gary in Tatts and he’ll also be appearing on Festival Radio on Wednesday morning.

There’s plenty else going on at the moment with The Players’ Championship golf taking place during Festival week for a change and the Champions League last-16 second-leg ties are always Cheltenham week so a big few days ahead for sports fans. I’ll have some views on both of those in the General Sports column on Sunday and then it’s the EFL Cup Final the Sunday after Cheltenham, also for a change.

There are now only ten songs left to be confirmed for Eurovision after the UK put in their entry yesterday. It will do well. Not a winner in my opinion but it has Top 6 potential, maybe Top 4, but I am expecting big things of France if they are confident enough to premiere their song ahead of the France-Scotland Six Nations game in front of 80,000 people next weekend. That could properly shake up the market.

I’m not spending Cheltenham in Benidorm like many (one day there a few years ago was more than enough for me!) but I will be heading out to Spain to chill out for The Masters the week after Aintree. A shame that they are not the same week this year as when they are that’s my favourite week of the year.

As for Aintree, just a three-weeks’ gap this year from four of late, but that used to be the norm (I even remember just a fortnight on one occasion) so it will be interesting to see how many Cheltenham horses end up there. There seem to be more horses waiting for it than usual this time.

Wishing everyone a great Cheltenham.