IRISH horses will win their fair share of handicaps at Cheltenham, regardless of tweaks made to the handicapping process by the British Horseracing Authority.

That is the view of Andrew Shaw, senior National Hunt handicapper with the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board. Last year Irish-trained horses won seven of the nine Cheltenham handicaps. The score was five wins each for Britain and Ireland at the previous three Festivals.

“Ireland have the best horses at the moment,” Shaw said. “You can see that from the results of the championship races at Cheltenham. It makes sense to me that this dominance would also impact the handicaps, even though those races are a level-playing field in theory.”

To support his argument Shaw pointed to the 1980s when Ireland often struggled to win a single race at Cheltenham. “We weren’t winning any handicaps at that time either,” he said. “Now Irish trainers and owners are getting their hands on the best horses on the market, and the results have gone in our favour.”

In the wake of last year’s Cheltenham Festival, at which Irish horses won 23 of the 28 races, the BHA instigated a review of its jump handicapping processes and established a Quality Jump Racing Review Group.

As a result the following actions were agreed upon:

Martin Greenwood, the BHA’s senior jumps handicapper, said: “From a handicapping point of view, last year was a bolt from the blue, but it was a funny season with Covid and so on and some of their results, fiddling about with a couple of pounds here or there would have made absolutely no difference. They’d have still streaked ahead. Whether that was just a blip, two weeks’ time will tell us more.”

Shaw believes there are additional reasons why British-trained horses may have “inflated” handicap marks compared to Irish horses of similar ability. Small field sizes in Britain leads to less competitive racing yet the handicap winners are likely to get the same rise as the winners of big-field competitive handicaps in Ireland.

He suggests that the larger fields in Irish racing also allow more opportunities for horses to be dropped in the handicap.

This week the BHA handicapping team said it had struggled to drop chase marks as the completion rate in their chases was relatively low.

Meanwhile, Tiger Roll will not be lining up for the Grand National at Aintree.

His owner, Michael O’Leary, had already ruled out a historic hat-trick bid due to his “ridiculous rating and unfair weight” and he was officially scratched from the race on Tuesday.

A total of 14 horses were removed, including fellow Irish-trained horses Eklat De Rire, Off You Go, The Big Dog, Assemble, Mister Fogpatches, Eurobot and Brace Yourself.

Nine of the first 10 in the ante-post betting for the April 9th race are trained in Ireland.