If you left Cheltenham on Friday evening with money in your pocket, you’re in a very small minority.
The 2026 Festival was, by the numbers, the worst for favourites backers in over a decade. We pulled every winner’s starting price from our database going back to 2015, and this year’s average winning SP of 14.50 is comfortably the highest we’ve recorded. For context, 2024 — a year widely considered punter-friendly — averaged just 7.70.
Half the winners returned double-figure prices. Exactly 14 of 28. That’s not a bad week at the office. That’s a structural demolition of the market.
The damage in detail
Here’s how it stacks up against recent years:
| Year | Avg Winner SP | Double-figure winners | 20/1+ winners |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 7.70 | 6 | 2 |
| 2025 | 12.82 | 8 | 5 |
| 2026 | 14.50 | 14 | 6 |
Six winners at 20/1 or bigger. Four of those at 33/1 or longer. Martator won the Grand Annual at 66/1. Apolon De Charnie took the Triumph at 50/1. White Noise, a 40/1 shot, won the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle. Home By The Lee landed the Stayers’ Hurdle at 33/1. These weren’t fluky short-runner races either — these were competitive Festival handicaps and Grade 1s with full fields.
Where the favourites went wrong
The overall favourite strike-rate — 8 from 28, or 28.6% — looks fairly normal. It’s bang in line with the 12-year average. The problem wasn’t that favourites stopped winning. It’s that the ones who lost got properly turned over.
In the Champion Chase, Majborough — the 1.83 favourite — was beaten by Il Etait Temps at 3.50. In the Arkle, Mambonumberfive (2.10) was turned over by Kargese at 8s. Bambino Fever went off at 2.00 for the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle and finished 16th. That’s not unlucky. That’s comprehensively wrong.
The Grade 1 novice races were a graveyard for short-priced horses. Across the Turners, Brown Advisory, Triumph, and Albert Bartlett — four key novice contests — the winners returned 12/1, 12/1, 50/1, and 20/1. Not a single market leader won any of them.
Who did win?
Willie Mullins, obviously. Eight winners despite the chaos, including three of the four championship races: Lossiemouth in the Champion Hurdle, Il Etait Temps in the Champion Chase, and Gaelic Warrior in the Gold Cup. Paul Townend rode four of those eight. Mullins has now won 8 or more Festival races in five of the last six years — a dominance that feels almost impossible when the rest of the market is in freefall.
Dan Skelton had a quiet but profitable week with two winners — Madara and Supremely West — both at single-figure prices when single figures were gold dust. Nicky Henderson landed the Supreme with Old Park Star and two handicaps through James Bowen.
What it means for punters
Level-stakes backing every favourite across the 28 races lost you just 93p. That sounds almost break-even, but it flatters the reality. Lossiemouth at 2.40 and Wodhooh at 1.83 did the heavy lifting. Without those two short-priced winners, the favourite backers’ P&L collapses.
The uncomfortable truth is that Cheltenham 2026 was a festival where knowing a lot about racing didn’t help much. The market was wrong repeatedly and substantially, across different race types, distances, and codes. Whether that’s a one-off or something shifting in how the Festival plays out, we’ll have a better idea when we run the same numbers in March 2027.
For now, it was a good week to be brave and a bad week to be sensible.