The 2025/26 show jumping campaign started six months and a few days ago, but traditionalists, especially among the trainers, still consider the actual season to have authentically only started during the two-day competition in Chepstow last month. writes Tony Stafford.
The season’s climax (or anti-climax if your name is Skelton) at Sandown at the end of April only confirmed what we already knew. When Willie Mullins sets his sights on a potential performance, he has the tools to drive it home. On that final day he bypassed the first two races on the Sandown card but won three of the other five and broke brave Dan’s heart again.
As Gordon Elliott discovered several times during their domestic battles in Ireland, no matter how much advantage he had over Mullins coming into the engine room of the Irish season, Willie had the tools to get the job done – and in style.
It is worth reliving that last day. Having ignored the first two races, both won incidentally by Gary and Josh Moore, Mullins’ subsequent hat-trick included the top prize, the £99k winner’s Celebration Chase, where South Africa-owned Il Etait Temps overcame a year’s absence to humble former two-mile champion Jonbon, with Willie’s Energumene in third for good measure. Back in the home action at Clonmel in midweek, Il Etait Temps completed a round for €35,000 to end their season in style.
Surprisingly, the Bet 365 (formerly Whitbread Gold Cup) did not include ten of its 19 entrants. Things went defiantly to the Olly Murphy/Sean Bowen team on Resplendent Grey, seeing off the top four of the Mullins hurdle, signaling both their positions at the top of the British jumping hierarchy.
Murphy was one of 14 domestic trainers who provided 30 of the 51 runners in the five races contested by Mullins; and Willie had the other 20! In total he raised £287,000 of the £530,000 available that day – or 55%. If Dan is still leading his 69-year-old rival going into the final day next year, perhaps he can bring in a bulldozer to dig up the course overnight. Then they will undoubtedly simply transfer the fixture to Kempton!
It may only be the end of the ‘fake’ phase of the campaign, but Dan Skelton has already dispatched 154 individual horses. Between them, 46 have collected 57 wins and £888,000 in prize money. I said it was ‘fake’, remembering yesterday’s Armistice, when the bombs had not yet fallen on London in early 1940 in what was known as the ‘fake war’.
Let me tell you how fake the show jumping season has been. Mullins has only had two jump runners here in Britain since he made all that money in April. Winter Fog, eighth in the Cesarewitch last month, progressed to Wetherby for the Grade 2 stay hurdle on Charlie Hall Chase Day and finished fourth out of five, raising a paltry £3,650 for his efforts. At Cheltenham, between these two excursions, Chart Topper stopped in a Pertemps qualifier.
Anyway, enough of that old stuff. Not quite, since the main thesis of my article – it took a while, Ed! – as it relates to a casual comment on Sky Sports Racing that “Dan Skelton is the ‘target’ trainer par excellence”. He is, of course, quite good and usually wins the handicap hurdles at the Cheltenham Festival, especially under the noses of Ireland’s handicapped brigade.
But I would like to nominate another British trainer, Jamie Snowden, for honing the skill of making long-term plans for his horses. Before he started training at Lambourn in the 2008/09 season, he was a top amateur associated with the Nicky Henderson stable and a regular winner of the Sandown Military races after and during an Army career.
On Saturday at Aintree, Colonel Harry returned after ten months away to win the Grand Sefton Chase with a patient ride from Gavin Sheehan, which for me at least was reminiscent of Graham Lee’s stunning win for Ginger McCain in the 2004 Grand National at Amberleigh House.
He inevitably has the Coral Gold Cup in Newbury in three weeks as his immediate ambition. The way Colonel Harry finished Saturday’s race suggests he will have a great chance of winning another “Hennessy”, as the trainer still calls the race after his win two years ago with Datsalrightgino.
It took a few years for Snowden to start working as a trainer, but some figures turned 19 on the fourth try and progress has been steady and impressive since then. After a few seasons in the high 40s, he made a significant jump to 62 last season.
That was achieved by a healthy 21 per cent, comfortably better than Skelton (19%) and Mullins (18%), and his prize money peaked at £807,000. He has already won 38 races this season from just 130 runs, with 23 individual scores from just 57 horses he had ridden until yesterday.
He is running at an almost unthinkable 29 percent so far this campaign, with another 66 runners in 2nd placei.e to 4e – making it 104 of 130 in the first four.
Snowden has an extensive program for finding and developing young horses. He keeps a very close eye on the pedigrees and after deciding and securing horses he often leaves the sale purchase to spend a year learning their job in Ireland before bringing them over. He is a stable who has deservedly reached the top of Britain. Be careful: he only gets better, which he has been doing excellently for years.
The 2025 flat racing season ended in something of a whimper at Doncaster on Saturday. It’s no one’s fault, but there were few top riders to begin with, with many going on holiday after their efforts at the Breeders’ Cup – the season ending for title purposes with British Champions Day at Ascot in mid-October – while others are gearing up for lucrative winter work in Dubai and elsewhere.
It can take a while to get going on Hong Kong’s demanding circuit – at least two circuits. David Probert and Richard Kingscote, who rode a good 2i.e at Sha Tin yesterday, have yet to get off the ground after being there for a while. Not so for Hollie Doyle, who made an immediate impact with an all-the-way winner on the first day of her contract there with a 20/1 shot on Wednesday.
Yesterday she took two second places, both better than their outsider chances and with rides in almost every race you can see she will soon be a fan favorite in the former colony.
At home, the star in Doncaster was undoubtedly Billy Loughnane, although he could not add to his tally of 180 wins. But that, and his second place in the Jockeys Championship behind the remarkable Oisin Murphy, tells the now four-time champion that any lapse in his sometimes questionable concentration will surely be easily punished.
Such is Loughnane’s momentum: in his third full season he could well reach the 200-winner mark, after a first six in 2022, 130 in 2023 and 162 last year. He seems unstoppable and is getting rides for many top stables, most notably Godolphin. His following is such that level-stakes bets on all his mounts have returned a 306-point loss in 2025 – indicating that despite his above-average skill, his mounts are routinely over-bet.
Another young rider already impressing is Toby Moore, 17, on his way with three wins (two ahead of Charlie Appleby) from his first twenty climbs. Ryan Moore’s son should be a strong contender for next year’s apprentice title, if any bookmaker is brave enough to offer a prize.
– TS
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