Johnny Henderson Grand Annual Challenge Cup Handicap Chase – Ladies Day

A hotly contested handicap, tricky to solve and full of potential winners, the Grand Annual Chase is your typical Cheltenham Festival handicap that punters have a love/hate relationship with.

Ran over the trip of two miles on the old course, there’s always a big field and 13 fences to jump, those two have the potential to bring plenty of drama. This race uses the same course and distance as the Champion Chase, run earlier on the card.

But there’s plenty more to this race than what meets the eye, including the fact that this is the oldest race at the festival, and it’s named after a man who could well have saved the festival and Cheltenham racecourse.

The Premier Handicap Johnny Henderson Grand Annual Chase is the oldest race of the entire Festival, having been run for the first time in April 1834 before the Cheltenham Festival even existed. Discontinued in the 1860s and revived at the start of the 1900s, it moved around for a time before settling back at Cheltenham in 1913.

Known as the Grand Annual, the name of banker and racehorse owner Johnny Henderson was added to the race in 2005.  The race was moved from Gold Cup Day to Ladies Day from 2021 onward to make room for a new Mares’ Chase on the last day.  It will therefore now be run on the old course rather than the new course and is slightly shorter with one less fence to be jumped (13 instead of 14 previously).

That course switch means the race is now a lot faster at the start and with a big field and false starts not uncommon. It means horses stuck at the back can struggle to get into the race.  It is a race that lends itself to more experienced and savvy jockeys as a result – consider that when looking back at results for information.

Race Facts

The Grand Annual is run left-handed on the Old Course, matching all of the other races that take place on Day Two.  It was originally run on  the new course when it was on the final day.

It lasts for two miles with thirteen fences that the horses need to jump over its duration. It is a handicap race for five-year-olds and upwards, so there’s no specific weight restrictions.

Previous Winners

Race Trivia

Records for the race go back as far as 1946. Despite that, only two horses have ever won it more than once. Top Twenty was the first horse to do so in 1958 and 1959, with the second win coming thanks to jockey work by a certain Fred Winter, whose name will be familiar with anyone who knows the Cheltenham Festival well. The second horse to win the race twice was Dulwich, winning it for the first time in 1974 and then again in 1976. It might have won in 1975 too, but the race was abandoned due to water logging on the course.

Numerous jockeys have won the Grand Annual more than once. Davy Russell, Frankie Carroll, Jeff King, Paul Carberry, Tim Molony and Tommy Stack have all won it twice, whilst Tony McCoy won it three times during his career. The record, however, belongs to Graham Bradley who won it four times. His first victory came in 1986 courtesy of Pearlyman, then he repeated the trick with My Young Man in 1992. Sound Reveille was the horse he crossed the finish line first on in 1995, then he managed his fourth and final victory in 1997 with Uncle Ernie.

Often when you have jockeys who have won the race numerous times you’ll also find trainers who have done the same, such is the relationship between the two parts of the horse racing world. It’s no major surprise, then, to discover that a number of trainers have won the race on more than occasion. Bob Turnell, Charlie Brooks, Clem Magnier, Colin Davies, Fred Winter, Jessica Harrington, John Edwards, Ken Oliver and Nicky Henderson all won the race twice during their career. The record for most wins as a trainer is held by Paul Nicholls, who has trained the race’s winner four times.

As well as the 1975 abandonment, the race was not run in 1949 because of frost, 1955 because of snow and 2001 because of the foot-and-mouth crisis.

The Oldest Race at the Cheltenham Festival

The Grand Annual is a race covered in history and takes the position of being the oldest race at the Cheltenham Festival. Of course, the race has undergone plenty of changes since it began.

The first record of this race dates all the way back to April 1834. Ran at Andoversford, across open country (fields, not a racecourse), it wasn’t actually held in Cheltenham, and more so, it was run over a distance of three miles.

But that race has become today’s race. In the 1860s, the race was halted due to a lack of interest, but it was revived in the 1900s.

To begin with, it was held at different racecourses, as many races were in those days. Courses such as Melton Mowbray, Leicester and Warwick all held the race over various years.

In 1913, the race moved to Cheltenham racecourse, and since then it has remained there.
Many people would assume that the biggest race of the meeting were the ones with the most history, and what the festival was built upon. However, the Grand Annual, a handicap, is one of the key early pieces of this meeting, and the oldest race on record that’s run at the festival.

Race Named after Johnny Henderson in 2005

Johnny Henderson, the father of racehorse trainer Nicky Henderson, sadly died in 2003, and since his death, Cheltenham racecourse has been looking for a way to commemorate him.

In 2005, they renamed the Grand Annual Chase the Johnny Henderson Grand Annual Chase in his honour.

At the time, it was the final race of the meeting, run after the Cheltenham Gold Cup, but it hasn’t changed day or position in the running order.

It’s a fitting tribute to the man, naming the oldest race at the meeting after him, because without his foresight and money, there may not have been a Cheltenham racecourse or Cheltenham Festival to enjoy.

Early in the 1960s, there was a real buzz around the development of houses, and rules around acquiring land to be built on were very relaxed.

Henderson saw this coming and saw the potential that the Cheltenham racecourse grounds held, and how appealing it would be to developers. He was worried, and rightfully so. Rather than sitting by and hoping things wouldn’t take a turn for the worse, he decided to get a group of people together and secure the long-term future of the racecourse and, in turn, the meeting.

Henderson would combine with other jockey club members to create what was called the Racecourse Holdings Trust. This group would go on to purchase the Cheltenham venue for £240,000.

From that moment, they were in control of the land, and that would mean it could not be sold from underneath them. In doing so, the future of the racecourse was secure, and so was the Cheltenham Festival.

This security enabled the development of the course, the expansion of its size and the race program they were offering.

As a racecourse, Cheltenham is the centre of UK jumps racing, and as a meeting, the Cheltenham Festival sits at the centre of the calendar. Without some clever foresight from Johnny Henderson, this may not have been the case