Cheltenham Festival Week 10 (9/1) uploaded - Andy Richmond's Beating The Bias (7/1 uploaded - General Sports (5/1) uploaded - Paul's Monthly Blog (1/2) uploaded - General Sports (29/12) uploaded
1/1/25
Happy New Year to all members and regular visitors to the monthly blog and wishing you all a prosperous 2025.
Christmas served up some fantastic racing. The best that I can remember for a long time. In fact, I would say that there is so much more positivity about jumps racing this season than has been the case for a good few years where even the Cheltenham Festival was getting a bad rap last March.
It was also a very positive festive period for The Jumps Season Service principally down to an ante-post 10/1 recommendation on Banbridge for the King George VI Chase and then finding Val Dancer for the Welsh Grand National who was 20/1 after the declarations stage two days ahead of being backed into 8/1 on the day. Therefore, following the big handicap winners that we enjoyed in November, Christmas was a continuation of what has been the best first half of a season since I started this website ten years ago.
I’d like to think that changing things around this season in terms of the format for the service has helped. Taking a less-is-more approach to the weekend racing appears to have paid off as sometimes when your head is in it full time then it’s hard to separate the wood from the trees. The weekly Cheltenham Festival columns, however, have been and will remain as thorough as ever.
Outside of those two big results for the website there were jaw-dropping performances from Sir Gino, Brighterdaysahead, Galopin Des Champs and The New Lion and we even had something resembling the old Constitution Hill back so the season is building up beautifully to being one of the most-eagerly anticipated Cheltenham Festivals for many a year. I’ll start to ramp up the number of ante-post recommendations when we get into ‘Trials Season’ at the end of this month and when the ‘Non Runner No Bet’ markets are formed.
And, for the first time in ten years, this season I am planning to a trip to Ireland two weeks before the meeting to take in some of their best Cheltenham Festival Preview Evenings from which I will report back for members before embarking on my usual tour of Britain doing the same the week before ‘nam. I would just say about the Irish plan, however, that is dependent on my daughter delivering what will be my second grandchild on time as the due date is February 18th. So, she had better not be too late!
As for the Cheltenham Festival Preview Evening that I am running for the first time in Northamptonshire, it's all-ticket due to safety-number regulations and only 25% of tickets remain so if you want to join Richard Hoiles, Andy Holding, Andrew Mount and myself for a night of Cheltenham debate and banter on March 4th for a tenner per head, then please contact The Stirrup Cup in Barton Seagrave.
It's now time for my usual early-January, midwinter break for a few days so I will be returning with Week 10 of the Cheltenham columns on January 9th looking back at the festive season as a whole. The General Sports columns on Sundays will continue uninterrupted and, in addition to having plenty to look forward in the coming weeks on the racing front, this month we will also have The Masters Snooker, Australian Open Tennis, NFL Playoffs, Premier League/FA Cup and Friday’s World Darts Final to cover.
Furthermore, it’s that time of year again so we should be hearing some more Eurovision Song Contest entries by the end of the month. I say ‘more’ as Albania and Montenegro have already released their entries (live performances are on YouTube) so I’ll give my verdict on those in the next General Sports column and then weekly going forward. I think the next entry to be confirmed is Luxembourg as their national final is on the 25th so let’s see if we can find the very early value again like last year with Switzerland at 22/1 and in many previous years.
At some point this month I also expect to announce a new project that I have been working on that will hopefully be of interest to many of you and expectantly it’s just now a case of dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s in the next few days so watch this space!
Finally, during the second lockdown of Covid, to keep members occupied I set up a Sporting Predictions Competition for the whole of the year. I am not doing that again but if you enjoyed it and want to enter something similar then a blog reader got in touch and asked if he could use the same template for his web page. Therefore if you want to get involved, the deadline to enter his competition is January 13th so email John beforehand on gwdihwracing at gmail.com.
Until February, have a good one.
