Festival Focus - Triumph Hurdle

Triumph-ant - Our Conor looks the pick of this year's Triumph Hurdle contenders

Friday’s curtain-raiser is the Triumph Hurdle a juvenile (four-year-olds only) novice hurdle which has been won in recent years by Detroit City, Zarkandar and last year by John Quinn’s Countrywide Flame.

The race can often be a tricky one to solve given that many of the leading contenders don’t have much racing under their belt and often the winner doesn’t appear in people’s consciousness until only a few weeks prior to the race.

Already ahead of this year’s event the market has undergone many transformations and prior to the weekend just gone I didn’t particularly have a strong fancy for the race.

That all changed following the Spring Juvenile Hurdle at Leopardstown though as Dessie Hughes’s Our Conor put up a fantastic performance to easily smash some smart prospects and catapult himself to the head of the Irish charge for the race.