FIGURING out what happened at the Dublin Racing Festival can be a key to Cheltenham and beyond, and one of the more interesting, and unusual, takes in the aftermath of the meeting came from the X (formerly Twitter) account @JinksMarmaduke.

The account does a fine job on speed figures and French racing, but his main thought after the DRF was that the usual outside bias on the Leopardstown chase track, let’s call it the Galopin Des Champs route after where he has raced in most of his big wins there, had flipped over the two days to the point where the horses out there were ‘running on a backwards escalator.’

This is something I missed first time around, stuck in the usual way of looking for horses that did well down the inner, but if that outer part of the track was unfavoured, horses running there were up against it as they were also covering more distance. Reasons for this are unclear but the extreme weather in the run-up to the meeting likely played a role, clerk of the course Paddy Graffin saying before the meeting that the water that covered the track had been pumped off into a wooded area beside the back straight.

Came up trumps

Instead of the Galopin Des Champs route being best, the Mark Walsh route came up trumps. Of the five horses that broke clear in the Irish Gold Cup, Fact To File was most towards the inner while the runner-up Gaelic Warrior also went that way after two out when he made his move.

Walsh made the running on Majborough and had the option of going widest of all as he was largely left alone in the lead but didn’t take it and instead went more towards the middle while Kaid d’Authie was always on the inner of Final Demand for his Grade 1 win.

If this is the case, it is possible that Fact To File and Majborough are not as good as they looked here and both had other questions to answer ahead of Cheltenham, the trip in the Gold Cup if Fact To File goes that way, the potential for faster ground for Majborough in the Champion Chase.

Reconsider?

The Irish Arkle is another race to consider with this in mind. Paul Townend and Kargese looked to have Romeo Coolio cooked turning in but when he went to the outer rail, the mare was soon in bother before she was switched to the middle of the track and rallied late.

That was a strange race with the extreme pace they went, but this might be as good a working theory as any.

There was also a couple of big efforts down the inner from horses that seemed to have things against them.

Firefox never looked like a stayer before but finished fourth in the Irish Gold Cup while his stablemate Golden Joy had seemed a weak finisher before coming home well behind Jacob’s Ladder in the two-mile and a furlong handicap chase. Both those Elliott horses had new equipment applied so perhaps that was the cause of their improved efforts, but a bias may have been a contributing factor.

We are unlikely to get answers on this until Cheltenham but there are a few horses that shaped better than the result against it.

Kargese is one, as is Galopin Des Champs. Perhaps he is on the downward path now but there is a suspicion he is being trained with Cheltenham in mind as he started back later this season.

Wide route

Kim Roque, fifth in the Leopardstown Chase, is another to consider. He took a wide route throughout and nothing else that went that way played any role in the finish while the four horses that beat him were also held up to various degrees whereas he was prominent throughout.

It seems he faced a double negative here, and looks on a good mark, though it is a little worrying that he hasn’t finished off a race since joining Joseph O’Brien, though he had excuses here.

Who is watching Irish betting markets?

THE IHRB were the big losers in the recent Philip Byrnes/Redwood Queen case, bringing forward an investigation that had little chance of success judged on the evidence put forward, but I doubt anyone who is interested in the integrity of Irish racing will be feeling great either.

On the day of the Wexford race, the BHA were monitoring the betting markets for the IHRB and flagged it for unusual betting patterns on three occasions yet had no part in the hearing itself.

In their place, was a representative of Idiro, an Irish company who describe themselves as an ‘AI consultancy empowering businesses with intelligent automation – let artificial intelligence handle the tasks you’d rather avoid.’

Idiro CEO Aidan Connolly spoke on their behalf and displayed an understanding of exchange markets that could at best be described as limited, drawing conclusions from data that even a casual market watcher would question.

Commercial relationship

It emerged during the hearing that Idiro and the IHRB were in discussions about a prospective commercial relationship and the obvious question is where are we now? Who is watching Irish betting markets? Is it Idiro? Someone like them? The IHRB? No one?

At the risk of being called a dinosaur, I would suggest that AI is unsuited to monitoring betting markets. The material is too nuanced, and the type of people one is dealing with (intelligent, and perhaps up to no good) can work around a model. All models are wrong, as they say, and is this one even useful?

Experience and practice

Having the BHA help monitor Irish betting markets may not have been a perfect solution but it could still have been a good one. Their integrity team have lots of experience and practice, for example there were over three times as many races run in Britain than Ireland in 2025, and patterns likely emerge.

The two jurisdictions overlap with horses, trainers and jockeys, and more importantly here, punters. If there are integrity issues, might it not help to have the big picture of both countries rather than a limited perspective?

Corruption hardly stops at the Irish Sea, and it is possible, if not likely, that people involved in it are doing so in both Britain and Ireland.

Furthermore, Irish racing is close-knit, which is a strength in many ways, but can bring conflicts of interest. It might be no harm to having someone from outside, without personal bias, calling it as it is.

The elephant in the room, however, and perhaps the most worrying for people concerned about integrity, is the black market.

It would be naïve to think that horses that are not running on their merits are being laid on public exchanges like Betfair when there is a raft of illicit options away from prying eyes.

Perhaps the IHRB will never get access to those sorts of markets, but can they at least try and get the basics right?