Cheltenham Festival 2022: Champion Chase day – live! | Sport

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Good morning from an overcast and slightly murky Cheltenham, where we are waiting for a band of rain to pass through and wondering if it will have any effect on the going ahead of the second day of this year’s Festival meeting.

The first light rain arrived at around 10am GMT and it is expected to continue until early afternoon, with one forecast suggesting up to 2.6mm/hour from around midday. That will be on top of the 5mm that Jon Pullin, Cheltenham’s new clerk of the course, decided to apply overnight, despite having suggested on Monday that there would be no more watering on the Old course this week.

“We’ve updated the ground to good, good-to-soft in places,” Pullin said in his early-morning briefing on Twitter. “Following a drying day yesterday we took the decision to apply some irrigation last night, so an average of 5mm went on from the top of the old [course] hill, and the two-mile start right up to the winning post.”

Hopefully it will not have any significant effect on the big race of the day – and quite possibly the week – when Nicky Henderson’s Shishkin lines up against Energumene in the Queen Mother Champion Chase, a rematch after their epic first encounter in the Clarence House Chase at Ascot in January. With Chacun Pour Soi, last year’s beaten favourite, joining his stable companion in the field – having also been anointed as the better of his two runners by Willie Mullins – the stage is set for one of the great festival occasions.

This is the only Grade One at the meeting that Mullins has yet to win, and it is not for want of trying, with Chacun Pour Soi (8-13), Douvan (2-9) and Un De Sceaux (4-6) all failing to deliver in the last six years. Shishkin, though, is a daunting opponent, unbeaten in 10 starts since falling at the second on his hurdling debut. He was just a length in front of Energumene in the Clarence House, which will give Mullins cause for hope, but after a stronger-than-expected start for British stables on Tuesday, he is certain to set off as a strong favor to get another home win on the board.

Forty minutes after one outstanding horse goes into the record books in the Champion Chase, another great favorite will take his leave, as the dual Grand National and five-time Festival winner, Tiger Roll, bows out in the Cross Country Chase. Win or lose, the Tiger is going to get a rousing send-off from the fans, but a win would be the perfect end to a Cheltenham career which started with victory in the two-mile Triumph Hurdle in 2014.

The only previous six-time winner at the Festival is Quevega, who took the Mares’ Hurdle six times in a row, and by coincidence her first foal, Facile Vega, is expected to go off as favorite for the Bumper at the end of the card.

Regular updates on the betting, rainfall gauges and other news will be here as they arrive through the day, and the first race will be off, as ever, at 1.30pm.

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