Red Dirt Road

What makes Red Dirt Road tick is the ground beneath his feet. The yard is clear on this: he needs genuinely wet, soft conditions to show his best. On fast or even normal ground he is a different horse, and that explains why his season tends to be shaped around the deep midwinter months when the tracks get heavy. His Aintree win on Boxing Day 2024 came first — a Class 2 race where the trainer noted he kept galloping and jumping all the way to the line, which is exactly the profile of a horse who stays every yard of a trip and never stops trying. Then came Sandown five weeks later. On the day the trainer felt the ground was not as soft as Red Dirt Road truly wanted, yet he still found two gears turning into the straight and pulled clear to win at the top level. That is a serious performance.

His most recent results — finishing 4th and 19th and then 7th in his last three outings — look flat on paper, but context matters. He has not raced on genuinely soft ground in those runs, and the team at Cheltenham have not forced the issue. With 51 winners sent out this season, this is a yard in form, and they are thinking big with this horse. The plan is to school him over fences and aim at chasing from around Christmas, skipping hurdles entirely. He is rated 142 over hurdles — a mark that puts him among the better jumpers in training — and his jumping has already impressed his jockey, Jonjo O'Neill Jr, who has partnered him in all four wins. The trainer's view is simple: if he jumps a fence as well as he jumps a hurdle, they will have something very interesting on their hands.