Lossiemouth bolted up in the Champion Hurdle this afternoon, beating Brighterdaysahead by six and a half lengths under Paul Townend. A proper demolition job that extended her perfect Cheltenham record to five wins from five starts.
But the bigger story isn’t about one horse. It’s about what’s happened to the Champion Hurdle over the past decade.
The Numbers Are Stark
We pulled every Champion Hurdle result since 2003 from our database. In the first 13 runnings (2003-2015), zero mares won. Not one. A handful ran, none troubled the judge.
Then Annie Power waltzed in at 5/2 in 2016, and something shifted.
Since that race, mares have won six of the last eleven Champion Hurdles:
| Year | Winner | Gender | SP | Winning Dist |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Annie Power | Mare | 5/2 | 4.5L |
| 2017 | Buveur D’Air | Gelding | 5/1 | 4.5L |
| 2018 | Buveur D’Air | Gelding | 4/6 | nk |
| 2019 | Espoir D’Allen | Gelding | 16/1 | 15L |
| 2020 | Epatante | Mare | 2/1 | 3L |
| 2021 | Honeysuckle | Mare | 11/10 | 6.5L |
| 2022 | Honeysuckle | Mare | 8/11 | 3.5L |
| 2023 | Constitution Hill | Gelding | 4/11 | 9L |
| 2024 | State Man | Gelding | 2/5 | 1.25L |
| 2025 | Golden Ace | Mare | 25/1 | 9L |
| 2026 | Lossiemouth | Mare | 7/5 | 6.5L |
Six from eleven. More than half. And it gets weirder when you look at the broader picture.
Mares Win Bigger
Across the full Champion Hurdle dataset in SmartForm (2003-2025, not yet including today), mares had a 33% strike rate when they lined up — five wins from 15 runners. Geldings? Just 6.6% — sixteen wins from 241 runners.
That’s a fivefold difference in win rate.
And when mares win, they don’t scrape home. Their average winning distance is 5.3 lengths compared to 3.5 for geldings. The Champion Hurdle mares tend to do what Lossiemouth did today — put the race to bed early and keep going.
It’s Only the Champion Hurdle
Here’s the thing that really caught our eye. We checked every other open Grade 1 hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival since 2016 — the Supreme, the Stayers’, the Ballymore, the Albert Bartlett, the Triumph. Mare winners across all of those races combined? Zero.
The Champion Hurdle is the only open championship hurdle where mares are competing and winning against geldings. Something about the two-mile trip, the speed test, the tactical demand — whatever it is, it suits them.
Lossiemouth’s Cheltenham Record
It’s worth spelling out just how ridiculous Lossiemouth’s Festival record is:
- 2023: Triumph Hurdle — won by 2.25L (11/8)
- 2024: Mares’ Hurdle — won by 3L (8/13)
- 2025: Mares’ Hurdle — won by 7.5L (4/6)
- 2026: Champion Hurdle — won by 6.5L (7/5)
Five starts at Cheltenham across four different races and she’s never been beaten. The combined winning distance is nearly 20 lengths. Her step up from the Mares’ Hurdle to the Champion Hurdle looked ambitious on paper — in practice, the open company made no difference whatsoever.
What It Means Going Forward
Mullins has now won six Champion Hurdles — Hurricane Fly (2011, 2013), Faugheen (2015), Annie Power (2016), State Man (2024), and Lossiemouth today. Two of those six winners were mares. Nobody trains Champion Hurdlers like Willie Mullins, and nobody trains Champion Hurdle mares like him either.
The conventional wisdom used to be that mares belonged in their own races. The data says otherwise. If you’re looking at next year’s Champion Hurdle market and dismissing a mare because she’s “just a mare”, the last decade’s results suggest that’s the wrong call.
Six from eleven isn’t a fluke. It’s the new normal.