Britain or Ireland: who do the Cheltenham weights favour?

The handicap entries for this year's Cheltenham Festival have been particularly keenly anticipated. The only way in which the imbalance shown up last year might have been meaningfully redressed in such a short time was through the handicaps, after a BHA review in the autumn started a process to expedite lowering the marks of more exposed horses.

The reasonable concerns from Irish horsemen and commentators that greeted this review were largely put down by the Grand National weights, which had the usual fringe cases on which some could play victim but offered no meaningful change across the sample as a whole. Cheltenham expands the sample and would in theory offer a greater test of where the BHA's review might be leading.

The answer is a little puzzling, so far as it exists at all. The single biggest revelation from the Cheltenham Festival handicap weights is that not an awful lot has changed. Exclude runners with little chance of getting into the final field and the average Irish-trained runner is up less than 0.2lb, while the British equivalent has been eased very slightly (0.26lb).