ALT: a woman in a white dress is standing on a stage with a barrel in the background

* Brighterdaysahead set for chasing ranks after success * Irish trainer has quintet ready for Saturday’s big prize Gordon Elliott opened the Grand National meeting with a 15-1 Grade One double on Thursday ahead of his five-strong challenge for the Grand National on Saturday, when a fourth success in the world’s most famous steeplechase would give the trainer a share of the all-time record. The highlight of Elliott’s afternoon was a two-and-a-quarter length defeat of Dan Skelton’s The New Lion in the Aintree Hurdle, a result which confirmed the form of the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham last month, when the pair finished second and third. It was also a second course-and-distance success for Brighterdaysahead, who has yet to register a win at Cheltenham in three attempts. Continue reading...

Nine years in, the appeal of lots of Grade One races, cheaper tickets and accommodation make Dublin the place to go Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, had two reasons to be cheerful after the Irish Champion Hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival on Sunday. His seven-year-old mare, Brighterdaysahead, had just won the feature race. And she was cheered back to the winner’s enclosure by a sellout crowd that included several thousand visiting racegoers from Britain. “The Dublin Racing Festival has been a great success and certainly it’s the first time you’ve seen a lot of English people coming over for the racing,” O’Leary said. “It’s a great festival in its own right, and they’re all very welcome. I hope they flew Ryanair.” Since his airline has nearly two-thirds of the market for flights between the UK and Ireland, it was more of a certainty than a hope. For decades, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, in Paris in early October, was British racegoers’ big weekend abroad, and reckoned to be the second-biggest annual exodus of British fans for a sporting event, with only the Le Mans 24-hour race drawing more. Less than a decade into its existence, however, the DRF is coming up fast on the Arc’s inside. Continue reading...

* Dublin racing festival belatedly starts on Sunday * Brighterdaysahead cut in betting for Cheltenham festival There was a full-throated roar from the stands as the 2026 Dublin racing festival finally got under way on Sunday and another as Lossiemouth, the favourite, went to post for the Irish Champion Hurdle later in the afternoon, but the cheers 10 minutes later were for her market rival, Brighterdaysahead, as Gordon Elliott’s mare convincingly reversed the form of the December Hurdle here last month to win the big race of the day. Lossiemouth and Brighterdaysahead were foaled within three weeks of each other in March 2019 but last month’s Grade One was the first time that the two mares had met on the track. Continue reading...

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