Cheltenham Festival 2026 Review: Results, Records and a 15–13 Prestbury Cup

The meeting in one table

Everything on this page is drawn from official result pages and the sources listed at the foot of the article. Where a race is not in our verified table we say so rather than fill the gap.

The four championship races

The Gold Cup. Gaelic Warrior, owned by Rich Ricci, won by eight lengths from Jango Baie. It was the fifth Gold Cup for both Willie Mullins and Paul Townend, equalling the record in each case.

The Stayers' Hurdle. Home By The Lee's 33/1 success for Joseph O'Brien and J.J. Slevin was the biggest-priced championship winner of the week. Ballyburn, second at 11/2, was the best of the market principals.

The Champion Chase. Il Etait Temps won at 5/2, but the story of the market was the runner-up: Libberty Hunter was returned at 50/1.

The supporting races we have verified

Eleven further 2026 results are confirmed against official result pages and the sources listed at the foot of this article. A twelfth winner, Meetmebythesea (Ben Pauling), is confirmed by the Racing Post, though the race is not yet in our results database.

The remaining 12 races of the 28 are not yet verified line by line in our database and are deliberately absent from this page.

Favourites, shocks and what the SPs say

Fourteen of the fifteen verified races carry a recorded winning SP (the Martin Pipe does not). Counting from the tables above:

The three headline shocks, with the implied probability their SP represents (1 divided by the decimal price):

Two cautions before anyone reads a trend into this. First, this is 14 races, not the full 28. Second, all four winning favourites were in Grade 1 races; the two handicaps with a recorded SP in our table (Grand Annual, County) went to 66/1 and 14/1 shots. A fuller favourites study will follow when all 28 results are verified.

The Mullins and Townend titles

Willie Mullins' eight winners took him to 121 Festival winners, the most by any trainer, and an eleventh leading-trainer title (eighth in a row). Seven of the eight are in the tables above: Lossiemouth, Il Etait Temps, Gaelic Warrior, Kargese, Kitzbuhel, King Rasko Grey and Apolon De Charnie.

Paul Townend's four winners — Lossiemouth, Il Etait Temps, King Rasko Grey and Gaelic Warrior — were all for Mullins and took his career total to 42 Festival winners. His five consecutive leading-jockey titles run from 2022 to 2026. Full records: Willie Mullins at Cheltenham and Paul Townend at Cheltenham.

How the Martin Pipe decided the Prestbury Cup

The Prestbury Cup counts Festival winners trained in Ireland against those trained in Britain. Going into the final race of the meeting, the Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys' Handicap Hurdle, the arithmetic was simple:

Air Of Entitlement, trained in Ireland by Henry de Bromhead, beat the British-trained Hot Fuss (Tom Dascombe). Ireland 15, Great Britain 13: a seventh consecutive Irish win, but the closest scoreline since the 14–14 draw of 2019 and a sharp narrowing from 20–8 in 2025.

Five things 2026 leaves for 2027

1. Gaelic Warrior goes into the 2027 Gold Cup picture as the defending champion; third-party reports since the summer have quoted him as ante-post favourite (no named bookmaker verified — see the Gold Cup guide).
2. Lossiemouth is the reigning Champion Hurdle winner; Brighterdaysahead was second.
3. The novices: Old Park Star (Supreme), Kargese (Arkle), Kitzbuhel (Brown Advisory) and King Rasko Grey (Turners) are the 2026 Grade 1 novice winners that the 2027 championship markets will be built around.
4. The Prestbury Cup narrowed to two winners. Whether that was noise or a shift will be one of 2027's questions.
5. Rachael Blackmore retired from race-riding on 12 May 2025 and was inducted as a Grand National Legend in April 2026; she does not feature in any 2027 jockey market.

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