Sean Bowen, jump jockey great who can’t buy a winner at the Cheltenham festival

Mike Trout is 34 years old, weighs 235lb and plays baseball for the Los Angeles Angels. Sean Bowen is 28, tips the scales at around 140lb and is the reigning champion jockey over jumps. At first sight, they do not have a great deal in common besides both being professional athletes (and even then, Trout earns more in a fortnight than Bowen can ever hope to bank in a year).

But when you break down what they do and, above all, when they do it, there are some distinct similarities.

Trout is widely recognised as the greatest baseball player of his generation, consistently putting up numbers during the six-month, 162-game regular that put him among the all-time greats. Yet he is shackled – though that is perhaps not entirely the right word for a $426.5m contract – to the serially-underachieving Angels, and when the serious business of Major League Baseball comes around in the October post-season, Trout is watching on TV. He has played in just four post-season games in a 15-year career, and ended up on the losing side in all four.

Bowen, meanwhile, is currently racking up winners at a rate that is without precedent since Tony McCoy’s retirement in April 2015. Before racing on Monday, he had ridden 134 winners from 505 rides in the 2025-26 season, which started in early May, a strike-rate of 27%. Next on the list is his younger brother, James, with 54 wins – little more than a third of his sibling’s total, while former champion Harry Skelton, whose brother, Dan, runs the most powerful yard in Britain, has 52.

Bowen is winning races that he should win. Favourites with Bowen on top have a return on investment of -4.57% in 2025, while the return from favourites overall over jumps is -7.41%. And he is also winning races that he shouldn’t, with his epic, never-say-die performance on Wade Out at Cheltenham on Friday being only the latest example.

Yet when it comes to the crunch in the spring, Bowen, for the moment at least, is a permanent also-ran. British jumping’s current champion jockey has had a total of 52 rides at the Cheltenham festival since making his debut at the meeting in 2014 on an 80-1 shot in the Kim Muir, and has yet to register even a single success. The average SP of his festival rides is 40-1, and just six have even managed to reach the frame.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon, as Brian Hughes, the champion three times in four seasons from 2019-20, could often be found swerving the festival to ride at Sedgefield or Doncaster in his championship campaigns.

But it does reinforce the extent to which National Hunt racing now has a regular season, from October to mid-March, and then a climactic post-season when, for practical purposes, the significant stats reset to zero – much as they also do in baseball.

One obvious reason for that, of course, is that, for a decade at least, a majority of the very best jumping prospects have been finding their way to Irish stables, and Willie Mullins’s yard above all. A relatively limited but richly endowed schedule at home means that there is little reason for those that rise to the top of the pile to cross the water until the festival in March. Which is when the serious competition begins.

The average SP of Sean Bowen’s rides at the festival, pictured, is 40-1. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

The relative decline in significance of Saturday’s Betfair Chase at Haydock, the first Grade One of the British season, could also be seen as a symptom of the changing nature of the campaign.

Just six Irish-trained runners have lined up since 2017, and A Plus Tard, the 2022 Gold Cup winner, is the only truly top-class name on the list. The best Irish chasers have the John Durkan Memorial Chase at Punchestown on Sunday as a much more attractive alternative, leaving the Betfair Chase with the best available from British yards, plus track-specialists like Royale Pagaille, the winner in 2023 and 2024, and Bristol De Mai (2017, 2018 & 2020) that will not be on anyone’s mind for the Gold Cup in March.

Native River, in 2018, was the last British-trained Gold Cup winner, and Haiti Couleurs, at 25-1, is the shortest-priced contender from a UK yard for next year’s renewal. The 2027 and 2028 winners too have, in all likelihood, already been sourced, bought and relocated to a top Irish stable.

It is not a situation that is likely to change any time soon, so while most of the best horses are will be in Ireland for the foreseeable, the arrival of a relentless new hero in the saddle is well-timed.

He is the first Sean Bowen rather than the next McCoy, but injury-free run through to the spring would probably see Bowen post the best winning total in a jumps season since McCoy’s retirement. He is richly talented, irrepressibly determined and will be a major asset to British jump racing over the winter months, whether or not he finally manages to break his festival duck.