El Fabiolo won by 21 lengths at Leopardstown yesterday. Twenty-one lengths. Over hurdles. After a chasing career that ended with three falls in his last five starts over fences, including a grim sequence at Cheltenham, Aintree and Punchestown last spring.
The nine-year-old looked like a different horse. Paul Townend barely moved on him. And the obvious question now is whether he turns up at the Festival in a couple of weeks, maybe in the Champion Hurdle or the County, and whether anyone should take the switch seriously.
We wanted to know: historically, do these chasing dropouts actually perform when they go back to hurdles?
The numbers aren’t great
We pulled every horse from SmartForm that ran at least three times over fences and then returned to hurdling. That’s 27,618 hurdle runs from ex-chasers.
The win rate? 6.1%. Place rate 21.0%.
For context, the overall hurdle win rate in the same period sits around 10-11% depending on the year. So ex-chasers underperform the field by a meaningful margin. At graded level — the races El Fabiolo would be targeting — it’s marginally better at 7.0%, but still below par.
When we narrowed it to horses that specifically fell twice or more over fences before switching back, the win rate barely moved: 6.2% from 2,902 runs. Falling doesn’t seem to be a useful predictor either way. These horses are, on average, just not as competitive back over the smaller obstacles.
But the best ones can be exceptional
The aggregate tells one story. The individual cases tell another.
Vroum Vroum Mag — another Mullins-trained mare — ran 11 times over hurdles after a brief chasing stint and won six of them, including graded races. Hunt Ball won all three of his hurdle starts after leaving chasing behind. And of course, there’s El Fabiolo’s own two wins from three since reverting.
The pattern, such as it is: horses who were genuinely top-class over hurdles before they went chasing tend to retain that ability when they come back. El Fabiolo won the Arkle at the 2023 Festival. He was a Grade 1 novice hurdler before that. The talent was never in question — the fences were the problem.
El Fabiolo’s form reads like two different horses
His last five chase runs: fell, pulled up, 2nd (beaten), fell, fell. His official rating over fences peaked at 170. Over hurdles since returning? Won at Punchestown on New Year’s Eve, ran flat in the Irish Champion Hurdle (but that was a huge ask after one run back), then destroyed a field by 21 lengths yesterday.
The in-running comment from Leopardstown tells you everything: “asserted before halfway, clear 5th, travelled well, very easily.” He was in a different postcode.
The Constitution Hill parallel
It’s hard not to notice the symmetry. Constitution Hill — fell at Cheltenham, fell at Aintree, beaten at Punchestown — has abandoned hurdles entirely for a flat career that started with a win at Southwell. El Fabiolo suffered near-identical trauma over fences and has gone the other way, back to hurdles.
Two of the best jumpers of their generation, both broken by their obstacles, both reinventing themselves. Constitution Hill’s flat experiment is unprecedented for a horse of his calibre. El Fabiolo’s return to hurdles is more conventional, but the 21-length margin suggests he might have more in the tank than the average chasing dropout.
What it means for the Festival
If Mullins sends El Fabiolo to Cheltenham — and everything Paul Townend said afterwards pointed that way — the data says be cautious. Ex-chasers underperform at graded level. But El Fabiolo isn’t a typical ex-chaser. He was a Festival winner over both hurdles and fences before things went wrong, and yesterday’s performance had more in common with his Arkle demolition than anything from his troubled 2024-25 campaign.
The 6.1% stat is real. But so were those 21 lengths.