Constitution Hill: is he too good to be true at 7-4?

To back Constitution Hill or not back Constitution Hill, that is the question.

His career has been full of theatre, and divided fans of the sport. One thing we can all agree on is that it’s the hurdles that have been getting in his way in the past year. 

One of the great Jump horses of the modern era was cantering when falling four out in last year’s Champion Hurdle, plus was going easily when hitting the deck two out at Aintree the following month. And he was just warming up when coming down early on at Newcastle in November. 

His feet will not have to leave the ground in the SBK Road To Cheltenham Novice Stakes at Southwell on Friday night, so in theory all he’s got to do is keep that massive engine of his purring along for 12 furlongs, with four-time champion jockey Oisin Murphy doing the steering. 

Of course, it’s not that straightforward for Nicky Henderson’s stable star. 

And the bookmakers seem to sense an opportunity to make more money out of a gelding who will have paid for plenty of their bills and holidays over the past 12 months.  

Several leading firms have pushed him out to 7-4, and they’ve not been knocked over by punters who now know that backing him is not, after all, a licence to print money. 

Constitution Hill has only once gone off at bigger odds since making his debut under Rules at the end of 2021. The Blue Bresil gelding started 9-4 for the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle four years ago before putting up a jaw-dropping display and beating Jonbon by 22 lengths. 

That exhibition was followed by a series of similarly dazzling displays, when odds on every time. The RaceiQ dta tells us he clocked 37.41mph when winning the 2023 Christmas Hurdle (his early performances are not in the database), with his official rating soaring to 175 after he had trounced State Man in the 2023 Champion Hurdle. 

It has since slipped to 170 but that still suggests he could make a huge impact on the level. 

As a rule of thumb, most racing followers/tipsters will lob 50 off Jump ratings to come up with a comparative Flat figure. It is an unequal science, of course, but that puts Constitution Hill on what you might call a loose provisional mark of 120. 

To put that into perspective, King George and Champion Stakes hero Calandagan was the highest-rated Flat horse last year, with a rating of 130. Those who ended the year rated 120 included Al Riffa, Diego Velasquez, Kalpana and Lambourn, who won the Derby and Irish Derby. 

We have no idea of what kind of rating Constitution Hill can run to. After all, he’s a nine-year-old who has never run on the Flat, plus not even finished a race in Britain for more than a year. 

And let's not forget that brilliant jumping helped him achieve that lofty rating. Before his travails in that department, he was exceptional at getting from A to B. There were few, if any, better jumpers around.

He  has still had only had 14 races (several of them merely laps of honour) and he won’t have to run to anything like 120 to resume winning ways. 

Only one of his dozen rivals, Gambino, has a handicap rating on the Flat. He sits on a perch of 83 but has a 7lb penalty to shoulder for a game win over Royal Hollow in a maiden at Gowran last spring. Incidentally, Royal Hollow has since gone hurdling and has a rating of 129 over Jumps. 

Some Flat horses go on to make better jumpers, and vice versa. Plenty can be good at both, with Sea Pigeon being an obvious early example. 

Most follow the orthodox route of starting on the Flat before perhaps going over hurdles. Constitution Hill is doing things back to front at an advanced age, but Willie Mullins has pulled off that trick with plenty of his team over the years. 

And you don’t have to spin back very far to find a Mullins “hurdler” who has upstaged “Flat” compatriots, with Ethical Diamond, rated 143 over Jumps after finishing fourth in the County Hurdle and seventh in the Scottish Champion Hurdle, landing the Breeders’ Cup Turf a few months later. Friday night’s contest is some way removed from the Breeders’ Cup. 

Fitness seems unlikely to be an issue for Constitution Hill, especially with connections keeping the Unibet Champion Hurdle option open to them. He’s hardly going to be short of work with that event just over a fortnight away, and Henderson insists his laidback star is still working like he did two years ago, for all that his glass is generally half-full. 

The all-weather should not be an issue. He will have worked on plenty of artificial surfaces at Seven Barrows throughout his career and he’s had plenty of pre-Cheltenham spins at Kempton in the past, again looking completely at ease there this time last year when gliding clear of stablemates That’s Nice and Aston Martini. 

I was lucky enough to be among a media pack in attendance and Henderson said afterwards: “It’s good to watch, isn’t it? It’s pure, raw, natural pace. One minute he’s upsides you, the next he's gone. The other two gallopers today just did their own thing – it was a two-horse gallop and a one-horse gallop effectively. We had to do that as the two others couldn’t remotely go with him.” 

In many ways, Henderson is merely keeping to his annual ploy of giving Constitution Hill a spin on the all-weather before Cheltenham, but this time with a bit of outside competition and £40,000 sitting on the table. 

He did similar during a big freeze at the start of 2014, when My Tent Or Yours easily won a “bumper for jumpers event” at Kempton before going on to be beaten a neck in the Champion Hurdle. There were eight such contests that day, and Henderson landed three of them. 

Kempton race on Polytrack, whereas Southwell is staged on Tapeta. Both are wax-coated, though, and generally if a horse handles one track, then they handle the other. 

Some are anxious that 12 furlongs could be as far as he wants on the Flat, but an end-to-end gallop seems unlikely given the mixed make-up of the field (between them they have had only eight runs on the Flat) and Constitution Hill does have a 2m 4f Grade One win over hurdles on his CV, so stamina should not be an issue in any case. 

There is not much depth to the race with eight of the 13 runners quoted between 40-1 and 200-1. 

The biggest dangers, at least on paper, are the Mullins-trained Daddy Long Legs (rated 152 over hurdles) and Square Necker. The latter made all when easily landing a steadily-run Dundalk maiden last time, at the main expense of a filly who went into the race with an inflated rating of 93.  

Constitution Hill has left us with a lot of unanswered questions over the past year or so. Friday night should at least give us a clue as to whether his legs can carry him quickly over two-and-a-half minutes or so. The jumping bit will be for another day, or possibly not.