How many races has Honeysuckle won at the Cheltenham Festival?

For the uninitiated, Honeysuckle is, at the time of writing, a ten-year-old mare, formerly trained by Henry De Bromhead in Knockeen, County Waterford, but retired to stud following her Cheltenham Festival farewell, when winning the David Nicholson Mares’ Hurdle, in March 2023. That was, in fact, her second victory in the race in which she opened her Cheltenham Festival account four years earlier, with a hard-fought half-length victory over the odds-on favourite, Benie Des Dieux, trained by Willie Mullins.

By that stage of her career, Honeysuckle was already a three-time Grade 1 winner, having won the first of her three Irish Champion Hurdles at Leopardstown the previous month. She would win the same race again in 2021, en route to an impressive six-and-a-half-length win over Sharjah, also trained by Willie Mullins, in the Champion Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival. In so doing, she made her regular partner, Rachael Blackmore, the first female jockey to win the two-mile hurdling championship.

Honeysuckle followed the same, familiar route in 2022, again with the Irish Champion Hurdle, the Champion Hurdle and the Punchestown Hurdle. On her return to action, she tasted the first two defeats of her career, at the hands of Teahupoo and State Man, but returned to winning ways in the aforementioned David Nicholson Mares’ Hurdle for her fourth, and final, Festival success. All told, the daughter of Sulamani won 17 of her 19 starts, never finished outside the first three and amassed £1.43 million in total prize money.