Sun Racing Plate Handicap Chase
steeplechase horse race in Britain
The TrustATrader Plate Handicap Chase is a Premier Handicap National Hunt steeplechase in Great Britain which is open to horses aged five years or older. It is run on the New Course at Cheltenham over a distance of about 2 miles and 4½ furlongs (2 miles 4 furlongs and 127 yards, or 4,139 metres), and during its running there are seventeen fences to be jumped. It is a handicap race, and is scheduled to take place each year during the Cheltenham Festival in March.
History
The race was established in memory of the 2nd Baron Mildmay of Flete (1909–1950), an amateur National Hunt jockey who rode three winners at the Cheltenham Festival. The inaugural race took place in April 1951, because the planned running, in March, had to be abandoned, due to a waterlogged course. It was originally titled the Mildmay of Flete Handicap Chase.
The Racing Post sponsored the race from 2006 to 2008, and during this period it was titled the Racing Post Plate. The 2009 running was named the Freddie Williams Festival Plate, in tribute to Freddie Williams (1942–2008), a popular Scottish bookmaker who owned a pitch at Cheltenham. The construction company Byrne Group supported the event from 2010 to 2014 and from 2015 to 2020 it was sponsored by Brown Advisory and Merriebelle Stable. The bookmaking firm Paddy Power sponsored in 2021.
The public source identifies “Sun Racing Plate Handicap Chase” as steeplechase horse race in Britain. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Racing, Plate and Handicap.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5004258. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1909, 1950, 1951 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sun Racing Plate Handicap Chase” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.