UK Horse Racing Tips

Istabraq, who won the Champion Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival in 1998, 1999 and 2000, has the distinction of being the latest of just five horses – the others being Hatton’s Grace, Sir Ken, Persian War and See You Then – to win the two-mile hurdling championship three times. Indeed, his Timeform Annual Rating of 180 places him second on the all-time list of hurdlers, ahead of the aforementioned quartet, alongside Monksfield and behind only Night Nurse.

Bought by intended trainer John Durkan, on behalf of J.P. McManus, in 1995, Istabraq was transferred to Aidan O’Brien when Durkan was diagnosed with leukemia the following year. Istabraq made his hurdling debut at Punchestown in November, 1996, where he was narrowly beaten but, having been gelded, won his next three starts on the way to his first appearance at the Cheltenham Festival, in the Royal Sunallliance Novices’ Hurdle. Durkan had predicted that Istabraq would win the latter, which he did, albeit all out in the closing stages.

Istabraq returned to the Cheltenham Festival in 1998, justifying favouritism in the Champion Hurdle with an effortless 12-length victory, made tragically poignant by the death of Durkan, at the age of just 31, the previous January. The rest, as they say, is history. In a remarkable career, Istabraq was, according to Timeform, ‘a giant in an age of pygmies’; all told, he won 23 of his 29 starts, including 14 at the highest, Grade One level, and amassed a little over £1 million in prize money. Having won on four successive occasions at the Cheltenham Festival, Istabraq was denied the chance to make it five when the meeting was lost to a foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001; at the time the Festival was cancelled, Istabraq was odds-on, at 1/2, to win an unprecedented fourth Champion Hurdle.

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