Ante-Post Betting / Simon Rowlands / 16 February 2012 /

Sizing Europe will go to Cheltenham with a good chance, but there could be one to topple him in his bid to win at the Festival for the third year in a row. Simon Rowlands reports...

It does not seem a year ago that I was arguing that Sizing Europe was not "overhyped", not "unsuited by Cheltenham" and not so fragile that he would "fail to make the Cheltenham Festival". I even wrote a blog about why he was worth backing at [16.0] for the Champion Chase (click HERE to read).

Twelve months on, and some things are not a whole lot different. Sizing Europe, who indeed won that race, is due to turn up again, as are Somersby and Big Zeb.

The big difference this time is the price.

Sizing Europe is [2.28] on Betfair for the repeat. He has won three of his five races since and confirmed himself a top-class chaser. But he makes nothing like the appeal from a betting point of view that he made this time last year.

Regular readers of this blog won't be surprised to learn that I fancy taking such a short-priced one on. Besides everything else, and as explained previously, good old-fashioned chance can see to it that apparent "good things" get turned over, not least at an event as competitive as the Cheltenham Festival. Every horse has its price.

Laying Sizing Europe is an option, but I would rather try to land on the winner instead in this instance. Big Zeb and Somersby are manifestly not as good as Sizing Europe at his best, but the same cannot be said with such conviction about Finian's Rainbow.

The Nicky Henderson-trained gelding has looked classy in winning five of his seven races over fences and has yet to cross swords with Sizing Europe.

He has crossed swords with Somersby, it is true, and came off second-best to him in the VC Chase at Ascot last time. But he looked the better horse by some way until the run-in.

If you don't believe me then dig out the video on the Attheraces website and consider also that Finian's Rainbow went as short as [1.26] in-play.

Remember the lesson from last year: there is a significant difference between a race at around two miles run in 4 minutes 07.8 seconds (as the Ascot race was) and one run in well under 4 minutes (as the Champion Chase is most likely to be).

Add to that the strong likelihood that Finian's Rainbow will be played as late as possible this time against a pace-forcing Sizing Europe and odds of [6.8] ante-post do not look at all bad. At the prices, it looks the sensible play.

Recommendation: 1 pt win Finian's Rainbow at [6.8]
.......
The recent cold snap prompted an interchange on Twitter regarding the desirability or otherwise of having a run close to Cheltenham, and that in turn prompted me to look into the statistics of "days since last run" at the last three Festivals.

The median absence of all winners is 38 days, though there is a clear (and unsurprising) difference between the figures for handicaps (32.5 days) and non-handicaps (46 days).

That means that, with less than four weeks to the start of the four-day Festival on March 13, it would be more likely than not that a winner had had its final preparatory run by now in a normal year.

But it has not been a normal year, and the cold snap that ruled out a lot of jumps racing in early-February - bang around the 38-days-to-go mark - might well have changed things. There is also the small matter this Friday of the rearranged Super Betfair card, a meeting that promises to be most informative.

Overall, there is no evidence that a quick turnaround harms a horse, assuming there is nothing wrong with that horse. Indeed, a quick turnaround can, in most cases, be taken as an indication that the horse is in good shape. The same cannot automatically be said about a horse returning from a lay-off.

Taking the horse population as a whole, horses perform better the less time they have off, as judged by actual performance compared to expected performance on Timeform ratings, though this is more marked on the Flat than over jumps.

One consequence of Siberia coming to Britain about a fortnight ago may well be that we will see more significant racing between now and Cheltenham, with trainers trying to get that last run in that they had originally intended to get in by now.

I would be surprised if it had a detrimental effect come the big day.

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