Willie Mullins confirmed it on Sunday morning: Galopin Des Champs is out for the season. Worked well on Thursday, wasn’t right on Friday. That’s racing.
But the timing — five days before the Gold Cup — turns what was already a fascinating renewal into something genuinely unusual. We went through 20 years of Gold Cup data in SmartForm, and there’s no modern comparison for a field this open.
The favourite problem
Since 2006, the Gold Cup favourite has won nine times from 20 runnings. That’s a decent 45% strike rate. But look at the winners: Galopin Des Champs (twice, at 7/5 and 10/11), Kauto Star (5/4 and 7/4), A Plus Tard (3/1), Long Run (7/2). Proven, dominant horses at the peak of their powers.
Gaelic Warrior is now 4/1 favourite. He’s talented — won the Arkle by eight and a half lengths two years ago — but his record at 3m+ in chases reads: won the Bowl at Aintree, second in the Irish Gold Cup (beaten 5 lengths by Fact To File), third in the King George (beaten a nose for second). He’s 0-from-2 at three miles this season.
That’s not the profile of Gold Cup favourites who actually win.
The contenders, by the numbers
Fact To File (9/2) has the strongest Cheltenham form. Two Grade 1 wins at the track — the Brown Advisory in 2024 and the Ryanair last year, where he won by nine lengths. He just won the Irish Gold Cup on heavy ground. But he was sixth at Kempton on Boxing Day, and his Punchestown run last spring (fourth, beaten 38 lengths) raised questions about his consistency. The positive: he’s 8, bang in the sweet spot. Nine of the last 20 Gold Cup winners were eight-year-olds.
Haiti Couleurs (7/1) is the romantic story — Welsh-trained by Rebecca Curtis, who has six Festival winners including a 50/1 Stayers’ Hurdle shot with Lisnagar Oscar in 2020. He’s won both his Cheltenham starts and hasn’t been out of the first three in a completed race over fences. He won the Irish Grand National last spring, the Welsh National in December, and followed up with a comfortable Denman Chase win at Newbury. The concern: his official rating of 159 is lower than every Gold Cup winner bar Coneygree (153) and Lord Windermere (152) since 2006. Then again, last year’s winner Inothewayurthinkin was only rated 160.
Jango Baie and The Jukebox Man (both 5/1) offer further options, but neither has the Cheltenham track form of the top two.
What the data says about this year
We pulled every Gold Cup winner since 2006 and looked at the pattern. The typical winner is 7-8 years old (15 of 20), has won a Grade 1 chase previously (17 of 20), and ran within four weeks of the race (18 of 20).
Only two horses in the current market tick all three boxes: Fact To File and Gaelic Warrior. Haiti Couleurs misses on the Grade 1 chase win, but his Cheltenham record and stamina credentials are hard to argue with.
The defending champion question
Inothewayurthinkin pulled off a 15/2 shock last year but has been nowhere this season — pulled up in the Irish Gold Cup, beaten 41 lengths in the Savills, 52 lengths in the Durkan. He looks a shadow of the horse who stayed on so strongly up the Cheltenham hill twelve months ago.
Where does this leave us?
For the first time in four years, there’s no Galopin Des Champs to anchor the market. Gaelic Warrior is favourite without a single win at three miles this season. Fact To File has the best recent form but a question mark over his temperament. Haiti Couleurs is the right age, loves the track, and has stamina to burn — but the rating gap is real.
If you’d asked us two weeks ago, we’d have told you the data was against Galopin Des Champs at ten. Now he’s gone entirely, and the Gold Cup is a race without a star for the first time since 2017, when Sizing John won at 7/1 from an equally muddled field.
That year, the favourite (Djakadam, 3/1) finished fourth. Just saying.