Cheltenham raised a cheer – but fatalities and fallouts tainted bounce-back festival
Cheltenham raised a cheer – but fatalities and fallouts tainted bounce-back festival
Attendances and British-trained winners were on the up but low points included more starting trouble and jockey spats
Attendance: up. British winners: up. Bookies’ profits: through the roof. Punters will wince at the last of those after a ferociously difficult four days at Cheltenham, with winners at 66-1, 50-1, 40-1 and 33-1 among the biggest skinners for the books. The Paddy Power client in Ireland who was paid €558,000 (£484,000) after putting Friday’s first six winners into a 50 cent each-way Lucky 63 would be a very worthy inductee into the Cheltenham Hall of Fame.
With the betting blinkers off, though, this was very much a bounce-back festival, for the track and British racing as a whole after three years of declining crowds and a decades-worth of embarrassing pastings for the home team at the hands of the Irish.
The 3.7% rise in attendance over the four days, 8,130 extra tickets sold, is modest, but encouraging. It was perhaps a case of going for the low-hanging fruit as the biggest jump, from 41,949 to 46,317, was on the second day, which was in danger of dipping below 40k on recent trends. A rebrand as Ladies’ Day contributed to a 10% rise and you can be sure Cheltenham’s marketing department will be working the database with added zeal over the coming months to build further back towards 50,000 next year.
The week’s total of 13 British-trained winners exceeded the most optimistic predictions. The home side certainly fancied their chances of improving 2025’s eight wins, but an additional five, which put them in with a chance of a tie until Henry de Bromhead took the Martin Pipe Handicap Hurdle at the end of Friday’s card, was at least two beyond any reasonable expectation.
Greg Wood's Monday racing tips
Plumpton 2.15 Escort’kheops 2.45 Kool Kid 3.15 Risk It All 3.45 A Tickatickatiming 4.15 Ferret Jeeter 4.45 Ghasham 5.15 Secret Des Lune
Ffos Las 2.30 Rest Is The Best 3.00 Port Or Starboard 3.30 Whiskey Yankee 4.00 Genietoile 4.30 Sioux Falls 5.00 Port And Brandy
Wolverhampton 5.30 Magnetude 6.00 Lhebayeb 6.30 Ted Le Saux 7.00 Corniche Girl (nap) 7.30 Twilight Madness 8.00 Moonhall Lass 8.30 Crown The Future (nb)
It was refreshing, too, for the British successes to be spread around, with nine yards getting a winner on the board. But there was still no one within hailing distance of Willie Mullins, who returned home to County Carlow with eight winners, six seconds and three third-place finishers. His haul included a rare treble in the meeting’s most prestigious feature events – the Champion Hurdle, Champion Chase and Gold Cup – with Lossiemouth, Il Etait Temps and Gaelic Warrior, and the same three winners, plus King Rasko Grey’s success in a controversial opener on Wednesday, were also enough to give Paul Townend the top-jockey prize for the fifth year running.
The extraordinary wall of noise as Old Park Star, the favourite, reeled in Sober Glory on the hill in the opening Supreme Novices’ Hurdle on Tuesday is one of the abiding memories of the week and Nicky Henderson’s latest Supreme winner, joining a list that includes Altior, Shishkin and Constitution Hill, promises to be one of the biggest stars of next season if, as expected, he moves on to chasing with the Arkle Trophy as a long-term aim.
Lossiemouth and Gaelic Warrior were hugely popular winners while a personal highlight was seeing the delight of Adam Nicol and the connections of Minella Study after his run into third place in the Triumph Hurdle. “Willie Mullins had eight in the race and we beat all but one of them,” he said. “He’s got more running today than I’ve got in my yard.”
There were inevitable downs alongside the ups. Footage of a brawl in the William Hill betting shop on Tuesday, which went viral on social media, was an ugly reminder of how readily a tweet can leave a lingering mark on the sport’s image.
Wednesday’s spat between Declan Queally and Nico de Boinville before the start of the Turners Novices’ Hurdle, which led to a complaint of racist abuse against De Boinville, was the most obvious manifestation of issues that plagued the starts all week, leading to one false start after another.
The British Horseracing Authority announced midweek it would conduct a review of starting procedures once the meeting had concluded and also seems intent on pursuing Queally’s complaint, despite the two riders having appeared to resolve their differences with a handshake on Thursday afternoon.
The lowest point of the week, and a dismal postscript to a thrilling Gold Cup, was the death of Envoi Allen a few minutes into retirement, having just competed at the festival for the eighth year in a row.
Envoi Allen, who collapsed and died on the walkway back to the unsaddling enclosure, was one of four horses to die either during or just after competing at the festival, from 475 runners.
Saint Le Fort and HMS Seahorse suffered fatal injuries in last-flight falls in hurdle races, while Hansard broke down between the third-last and second-last fences in the Arkle Trophy. None of the fatalities were the result of a fall in a steeplechase.
James Given, the BHA’s director of equine health and welfare, confirmed on Friday evening that Envoi Allen, like all finishers at the meeting, had been “looked at and passed fit to come down the walkway”. Like all festival runners, “he had the normal pre-race examination, had his heart listened to, was trotted up, his limbs were checked.”
Envoi Allen is believed to have suffered an “acute cardiovascular collapse”. In jump racing, Given told the BHA’s X feed on Friday, this occurs in “nine per 10,000 starts, a very rare event”. Even so, it is still “something we are studying to find out more about it,” Given added. “We are the first country in the world to allow heart monitors to be worn on horses while racing, and we’re learning stuff we didn’t know even a year ago.”
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) subsequently issued a statement on Saturday which said that the organisation was “deeply saddened” by the equine fatalities. “The deaths … mean 24 horses have lost their lives in competitive racing in the UK this year alone. One death is too many – but the scale of fatalities reiterates the urgency that lessons must be learned – including what caused the loss of life, decision-making during the race, and any future means of prevention.
“These incidents are clearly at odds with the UK’s status as a nation of animal lovers. The RSPCA remains concerned about racehorse welfare, so we continue to engage with the industry to advocate for further improvements, including the introduction of greater safety measures, and improvements for equine welfare both on and off the track.”
The RSPCA is (or should be) well aware racing has successfully invested many millions of pounds to drive down the number of fatal injuries – over jumps in particular – in recent years and continues to do so. Any athletic activity, meanwhile, comes with a risk of injury that can never be eliminated entirely, and the 24 fatal injuries referenced in its statement are from 14,230 starts so far this year – an overall rate of just 0.17%, or between one and two for every 1,000 starts.
So while the overall mood is one of positivity after the 2026 festival, it should be a concern for the sport’s executives that there are echoes in the RSPCA’s statement of the language used by more hardline animal rights groups, which campaign for an end to all use of animals by humans.
With the Grand National next up in the busy spring calendar, a robust response to highlight racing’s welfare efforts, both in public and behind-the-scenes, should perhaps be a priority on the sport’s post-festival checklist.
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OpenAI’s adult mode will reportedly be smutty, not pornographic
The feature was delayed, reportedly due to internal concerns surrounding moderation and safeguarding children.
OpenAI’s delayed “adult mode” for ChatGPT is expected to support saucy text conversations at launch, but not the chatbot’s ability to generate images, voice, or video. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, an unnamed OpenAI spokesperson described content that will be provided by the upcoming feature as smut rather than pornography, allowing ChatGPT users to generate textual chats with adult themes.
The feature was initially announced in October, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claiming that the company had managed to mitigate enough of the “serious mental health issues“ with its AI model to relax safety restrictions and introduce “erotica for verified adults.” ChatGPT’s adult mode was expected to launch sometime this quarter, but OpenAI said earlier this month that it was delaying the rollout to focus on higher-priority tasks. A new release timeline has yet to be announced.
The delay was also due to internal concerns and technical challenges around safeguards for the feature, according to The Wall Street Journal’s reporting. A council of advisors selected by OpenAI warned the company in January that ChatGPT’s adult mode may be accessible to children and foster unhealthy emotional dependence on the chatbot, with one unnamed council member saying OpenAI risked creating a “sexy suicide coach.”
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Content moderation issues have also contributed to the delays. Sources familiar with the matter told The Journal that OpenAI is struggling to lift ChatGPT’s restrictions on NSFW content while keeping more harmful scenarios off limits, such as those depicting nonconsensual behavior or child sexual abuse.
The age-prediction system that OpenAI developed to keep children away from erotica was also, at one point, misclassifying minors as adults about 12 percent of the time. Given ChatGPT attracts around 100 million users under 18 each week, that error rate could allow millions of minors into sexualized conversations with the chatbot. OpenAI’s age prediction algorithms show similar performance to the rest of the industry, an unnamed spokesperson told The Journal, but “will never be completely foolproof.”
Sticking to text-based conversations may make it easier for the ChatGPT-maker to navigate around rules like the UK’s Online Safety Act, which requires online platforms to enforce age verification for pornographic images, but not written erotica. It also contrasts with more visual NSFW experiences from rival AI providers, such as Grok’s “spicy” companions, with xAI’s Elon Musk announcing last week that Grok’s image and video generator is allowed to spit out anything that’s “allowed in an R-rated movie.”
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2026 Oscars Analysis: How ‘One Battle’ Beat ‘Sinners,’ Jordan Overcame Chalamet and Penn Won Without Doing Anything
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An awards season that often felt like an endurance test — talk about one battle after another — came to an end on Sunday evening with the 98th Academy Awards. The results at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood confirmed that even though the Academy has changed significantly over the decade since it was rocked by #OscarsSoWhite — its membership today includes way more non-males, non-whites, non-Americans and non-AARP-members than ever before — the statistics that have long offered clues about Oscars outcomes remain dependable.
Indeed, despite all the talk of a late Sinners surge, One Battle After Another still won the top prize, best picture, just as it did at every other notable awards ceremony this season — from the Gothams to the Golden Globes to the guilds, not to mention all the major critics groups, plus the BAFTA Awards — save for the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards) two weeks ago.
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It was easy to get swept up in the excitement of Sinners’ best cast win at the Actor Awards — the reaction in the room was exuberant — but that prize has a terrible track record of predicting the best picture Oscar (now just 15 of 32 times). The fact that the best cast Actor Award did presage several of the biggest best picture Oscar surprises of yesteryear (including Shakespeare in Love, Crash and Parasite), and that this year’s Actor Awards took place in the middle of the final round of Oscars voting, unfortunately gave Sinners supporters false hope.
Why did Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film prevail over Ryan Coogler‘s when both were Warner Bros. releases that skipped the festival circuit, went directly to movie theaters and proved to be darlings of critics and audiences alike, and when Sinners grossed more money and landed more Oscar nominations (16 — two more than the previous all-time record — versus 13)? Let’s unpack that…
For one thing, being the most Oscar-nominated film of the year has limited significance. In the past decade, it didn’t help Emilia Pérez against Anora, The Power of the Dog against CODA, Mank against Nomadland, Joker against Parasite, The Favourite and Roma against Green Book, La La Land against Moonlight or The Revenant against Spotlight. And this year, you couldn’t fault One Battle for not having an original song or much in the way of makeup/hairstyling or visual effects, the three categories in which Sinners landed noms but One Battle did not. Both films got nominated for everything they could have realistically hoped for (minus One Battle’s newcomer Chase Infiniti in the crowded best actress race).
Additionally, One Battle had genre on its side. In the post-#OscarsSoWhite era, the Academy has embraced a wider assortment of films than ever before, rendering moot the notion of an “Oscar movie” by awarding best picture to The Shape of Water, Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once. But a zombies-centric film — up against a dramedy/thriller — was perhaps a bridge too far for even a hipper Academy.
Most significantly, I think, One Battle was a major work — if not the best work — of a filmmaker widely regarded as overdue for recognition, not unlike The Departed (Martin Scorsese) or Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan). Indeed, prior to One Battle, Anderson was already well-established as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation — see Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread, in particular — and yet had gone 0-for-11 at the Oscars. One Battle provided voters with a sufficient excuse to right that wrong.
On Sunday, it became clear pretty early in the show that Sinners’ best picture prospects were in trouble. If the film had the juice to topple One Battle, then that probably would have manifested itself in the race for best supporting actress, but Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku came up short; shortly thereafter, it lost the inaugural Oscar for best casting — which every pundit of note had predicted it to win — to One Battle, no less; and by the time Sinners’ Delroy Lindo lost best supporting actor to one of the two One Battle nominees in that category, the cake was baked.
Fortunately, both films’ auteurs got moments in the sun — Anderson won best adapted screenplay and Sinners‘ Ryan Coogler won best original screenplay back-to-back before Anderson claimed best director and best picture later in the night. Plus, both films took home acting awards (best actor for Sinners and best supporting actor for One Battle) and craft awards (casting and film editing for One Battle, cinematography and original score for Sinners). The final score: One Battle 6, Sinners 4.
Speaking of the acting awards, though, it must be noted that the Actor Awards were, in fact, the only awards group to presage all four of this year’s individual acting Oscar winners: Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley for best actress, Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan for best actor, Weapons’ Amy Madigan for best supporting actress and One Battle’s Sean Penn for best supporting actor.
It’s interesting that a group comprised only of actors (SAG-AFTRA, all 160,000 members of whom vote for the Actor Awards winners) and a group in which actors account for less than 12% of all voters (the Academy) both responded not only to the same performances, but to performances that might be described as Acting with a capital A: Buckley playing a grieving mother who wails upon losing a child and seems possessed by a theatrical production; Jordan playing twins with very different personalities; Madigan chewing scenery in clown makeup; and Penn sporting an erection and a glass eye.
They all took very different paths to their wins.
Penn did not campaign or show up for any award shows except the Golden Globes, but gave such a memorable performance — and, despite being a difficult guy, is so highly regarded as an actor — that he still won BAFTA and Actor Awards en route to Academy members catapulting him into its rarified club of three-time male acting Oscar winners (the only other members of which are Walter Brennan, Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis).
Penn was up against formidable talents, including two septuagenarian first-time nominees, Sentimental Value’s Stellan Skarsgård and Sinners’ Lindo. But a path to victory was always going to be tough for a performance not in English (Skarsgård would have been the first such winner in the supporting actor category) and/or a performer who wasn’t even nominated for any other major award (Lindo hoped to follow in the 25-year-old footsteps of Marcia Gay Harden, the only person who has ever overcome that stat).
Madigan, meanwhile, won early in the year at the Critics Choice Awards, in something of a surprise — many were still predicting Wicked: For Good’s Ariana Grande at the time — and only continued to build goodwill between then and the Actor Awards, when she won again.
To be sure, the other precursors were all over the place, with Sinners’ Mosaku winning BAFTA, One Battle’s Teyana Taylor winning the Golden Globe and Sentimental Value’s Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas winning some big critics prizes. And it was a bit disconcerting that Madigan was her category’s only nominee whose film wasn’t also up for best picture.
But what proved to be more important is that she has been in the business forever (her prior Oscar nom came 40 years ago, before any of her fellow supporting actress nominees were even born), knows and is known by everyone (whereas most people had not even heard of three of her four fellow nominees a year ago) and is one-half of a great Hollywood couple (not unlike another veteran who won the same Oscar for another horror film 57 years ago, Rosemary’s Baby’s Ruth Gordon).
As for Jordan, he initially seemed to be trailing Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet, given that won at the Critics Choice and Golden Globe awards — but those two prizes were determined solely by journalists, of which there are virtually none in the Academy. The Academy clearly preferred Sinners to Marty Supreme — Marty Supreme ended up going 0-for-9 at the Oscars, a worse shutout than all but five films ever, The Turning Point (0-for-11), The Color Purple (0-for-11) Gangs of New York (0-for-10), the 2010 True Grit (0-for-10) and American Hustle (0-for-10). And many individual members said they were repelled by the character Chalamet played in the film.
Additionally, it seems that the best actor race was jolted, in the homestretch, by a variety of factors, from Chalamet’s unconventional approach to campaigning, which rubbed many the wrong way, to the terribly unfortunate incident that occurred while Jordan and Lindo were presenting at the BAFTA Awards, which evoked from many sympathy and admiration. Plus, seeing Jordan win the best actor Actor Award in the middle of the Oscar voting window presented to Academy members a clear and appealing alternative to Chalamet.
Buckley, meanwhile, was a no-doubter from the moment her film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. Even people who disliked Hamnet liked her performance and her, and why not? In addition to being a tremendously gifted actress, she is also one of the most genuine and lovely people I encountered all season long. And my guess is that the Irishwoman, at just 36, will soon be back in the hunt for a sibling for her new statuette.
Elsewhere, best documentary feature went to the team behind Kino Lorber’s powerful Mr. Nobody Against Putin (my tablemates at the Oscar Nominees Luncheon) over another equally affecting exposé, Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor. But Netflix dominated the remaining categories, picking up best costume design, makeup/hairstyling and production design for Frankenstein; for KPop Demon Hunters, the most watched original film in its history, best animated feature and original song (“Golden”); best documentary short for All the Empty Rooms; and for The Singers, which the company was smart enough to acquire — probably for a pittance — late in the season, best live action short (in a tie with Two People Exchanging Saliva). The streamer’s total tally of seven matches a company-best (first achieved five years ago).
Some final takeaways?
I thought that this year’s telecast, like last year’s, was very solid, highlighted by returning-host Conan O’Brien’s amiable emceeing; a skillfully executed In Memoriam segment (although the omission of Brigitte Bardot was inexcusable); the Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters performances; and the suspenseful presentations and gracious acceptances of the big awards. Also, kudos to Kumail Nanjiani for his deft handling of the potentially treacherous terrain of a tie (only the seventh in Oscars history, 13 years after the sixth, which I remember witnessing in 2013).
My only quibbles with the show: the Marvel “reunion” was overhyped (just Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans?); the playing-off of winners was handled poorly for the second year in a row; and a bunch of presenter decisions seemed off to me. Bill Pullman and Lewis Pullman are fine talents, but don’t rise to the level of accomplishment or familiarity that would merit being Oscars presenters; Robert Pattinson and Zendaya were odd choices to present best director, as opposed to, say, recent winner and current Directors Guild president Christopher Nolan; and as much as I love Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, I’m not sure that the 25th anniversary of Moulin Rouge!, a film to which the Academy awarded only two Oscars (art direction and costume design), merited having them co-present best picture. (I wonder if they tried Tom Cruise, one of this season’s honorary Oscar recipients?)
I’ll close with a few personal notes. (1) I was very pleased that the final Feinberg Forecast of the season correctly projected 21 of 24 categories, including all of The Big Eight and all three shorts. (2) I was heartened to see so many past guests of my podcast Awards Chatter take home Oscars, among them Jordan, Buckley, Penn, Madigan, Sentimental Value’s Joachim Trier, All the Empty Rooms’ Joshua Seftel and KPop Demon Hunters’ EJAE. I thank them for their time, and encourage you to subscribe — for free — if you haven’t already done so. (3) And lastly, I want to thank my THR colleagues, readers/listeners and friends/family for their support over the course of this whole season — it was a grueling but mostly enjoyable ride that ended with my 15th trip to the Oscars, a privilege that I do not take for granted. And now… sleep!
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