Champion Hurdle Preview - Festival Focus

Let's Make a Rendezvous - Melodic Rendezvous is the value call in the Champion Hurdle

This year’s Champion Hurdle looks a truly vintage renewal and has long looked like being the best race of the festival this year.

The problem with that though is that there is very little value left in the market for a race that has been prominent in everyone’s thoughts since last year’s festival drew to a close.

There was a strong changing of the guard vibe around the champion hurdling division at the start of this season but reigning two-time champion Hurricane Fly has shown he is not going to hand over his crown without a fight by beating his two main challengers from his base in Ireland already this season.

The Fly has never really received the recognition he deserves in my opinion and people will undoubtedly still underestimate him until he is eventually packed off in to retirement.

Top Ten Performances of the Jumps Season 2012 - 2013

Sol Power - Solwhit and Paul Carberry winning the Liverpool Hurdle in April.

Now may seem like somewhat of a strange time to be discussing the jumps season just gone given that we have now already had our first classics of the season but in order to properly cap off my coverage of the 2012-2013 national hunt season I need to put my top ten performances of the season out there.

We definitely enjoyed a vintage jumps season in 2012-2013 and many of the horses and jockeys that made it such an incredible six months feature in this countdown.

The majority of the entries are big race wins at the highest level but there are also a couple of performances from handicaps that could scarcely be believed as well as some visually stunning performances that may not have carried as much weight as some others form-wise.

Jockeyship also plays a factor in the ranking of some of these as we also saw some rides for the ages this season just gone in addition to all the equine talent that lit up the winter.

At the end of the day horse racing has always been, and always will be, a game of opinions and this list merely offers my opinion on just what the top ten performances of the 2012-2013 jumps season were.

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.