Cheltenham Festival - Day 1

The first day of this year's Cheltenham Festival and it was a bright, sunny Spring afternoon to get proceedings underway. It still gets the adrenalin flowing when you hear the roar of the crowd go up at the start of the Supreme Novices Hurdle.

It was a superb day of racing, with the bookies really stealing a march on the punters. Only one clear favourite won, and we saw two big-priced winners in Ebaziyan at 40/1 and Joes Edge at 50/1 Plenty of time for the punters to win their money back!

My only action came more than 200 miles away from the Gloucestershire countryside at Sedgefield. Miss Pross won at 2/1 and was easy to back at 5/2 on the exchanges.

The lay bet I put up at Cheltenham was Amaretto Rose in the Supreme Novices Hurdle. This was obviously to be her biggest test to date, with her last win being a 17k novice hurdle at the flat Haydock track. Cheltenham takes a lot more getting, and I felt she may find one too good here up against the best geldings and horses in the country. I was prepared to lay at 2/1 but the price came down only as low as 3.15 on Betfair. So although she was beaten, this has to go down as a 'no bet'.

Overall a 2.5 point gain to the account.