Dan Skelton on The Race Lab

Dan Skelton Is Having His Best Season Ever — And the Festival Hasn't Even Started

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Protektorat’s win in the Premier Chase at Kelso yesterday was the kind of result that barely registers as a surprise anymore. A year ago, Dan Skelton saddled Protektorat to win the Ryanair Chase at the Cheltenham Festival. Now the horse is picking up Listed prizes as a warm-up. Business as usual.

But zoom out and there’s a bigger story here. Skelton’s 2025-26 season is comfortably the best of his career, and there are still four months of it left — including a certain four days in mid-March.

Panic Attack's Grand National Dream: The Numbers For and Against

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:00:00 +0000

No horse had ever won both the Paddy Power Gold Cup and the Coral Gold Cup in the same season. Then Panic Attack did it inside a fortnight.

We went through every winner of both races in the SmartForm database. Not one horse had doubled up in a single campaign — until this ten-year-old mare rattled off victories at Cheltenham on November 15th and Newbury on November 29th, improving from a rating of 135 to what is now 147 after her stroll in a Listed mares’ chase at Newbury in January.

The Numbers Behind Dan Skelton's Trainers' Championship Charge

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Dan Skelton doesn’t do press conferences. He doesn’t cultivate mystique. He just sends out horses — a lot of them — and an increasingly alarming percentage of them win.

With the season entering its business end, Skelton sits clear in the Trainers’ Championship race, and SmartForm data shows why: 127 winners from 762 runners this season at a 16.7% strike rate, with an extraordinary 43.3% of his runners finishing in the first three.