There have been rain-soaked festivals and freezing festivals since National Hunt’s showpiece meeting started to emerge from the winter season to tower over the racing landscape. There was no festival at all in 2001, due to the foot-and-mouth crisis, and another behind closed doors during the third Covid lockdown in 2021. Throughout that time, all the way back to the mid-1980s, the key indicators – including the number of races, prize money, attendance and betting turnover – have always been trending up.
The notion of “peak Cheltenham”, if it was ever considered at all, was off in the middle distance, perhaps when the track managed to sell out all four days. So the jumping fraternity will head to the West Country on Tuesday in a somewhat uncertain frame of mind, with Britain’s stables facing their now annual battering from the Irish and the possibility, at least, that peak Cheltenham has been and gone.
It is just two years since the crowds came roaring back after the spectator-less festival, just as they had after it succumbed to foot-and-mouth. The four-day aggregate attendance was a record of nearly 281,000, with almost 74,000 crammed in for the Thursday and Friday cards.
Tuesday’s total of 68,567 was a record too and a subsequent decision to cap attendance for all four days at 68,500, to ensure that “the festival remains an attractive and enjoyable experience for the long term”, seemed sensible, with numbers already at, or above, that level on all but the second afternoon.
Twelve months later, it was a very different picture. The post‑pandemic bounce fell flat and attendance on the first three days went through the floor, leading to an aggregate of 240,603 that was 14% down year-on-year.
Any day at the races, never mind one that will cost several hundred pounds in all, was a tough sell in 2023, with inflation and fuel prices through the roof and the cost-of-living crisis front and centre. Attendance in 2009, a few months after the September 2008 economic crash, was also down on the 2007 figure, although by a more modest 8%, and returned to steady growth soon afterwards.
A train strike on day three last year also made life difficult, but at the end of the meeting Ian Renton, the track’s managing director, expressed “total confidence … that crowds will be back to normal levels next year”.
The mood music from Cheltenham this time around is more subdued. There were tickets available for Gold Cup day in late February – it sold out before the end of January in 2022 – while Jon Pullin, the clerk of the course, suggested a fortnight ago that, while overall Cheltenham sales were “starting to pick up”, the hope is to “end the week with similar numbers to last year”.
If that is the hope, then the reality may well be that sales are lagging behind 2023. If so, the news that Constitution Hill, arguably the meeting’s biggest star, would not be fit to defend his title in Tuesday’s Champion Hurdle, is unlikely to encourage walk-up ticket sales on the opening day.
Constitution Hill’s late scratching from the cast list has added to the sense of a meeting that is setting out on the back foot. But since this is the festival, it could easily be punching its weight and more again by Friday and there are plenty of potential feelgood stories scattered over the next four days. A win for the hugely popular Paisley Park in Thursday’s Stayers’ Hurdle – followed, it seems, by immediate retirement – would surely rank among the most memorable festival days of recent decades.
Even in the absence of Constitution Hill, there are plenty of outstanding horses and exciting head-to-heads, such as El Fabiolo versus Jonbon in Wednesday’s Champion Chase, to enjoy, while Friday’s Gold Cup has a deep cast of characters and plotlines in a field headed by a very backable favourite in Galopin Des Champs.
But it is noticeable that even with Constitution Hill missing, there is still an odds-on favourite for the Champion Hurdle in Willie Mullins’s State Man. He is just one among as many as eight potential odds-on shots over the 28 races, which would set another, and somewhat unwanted, record for the meeting.
It generally pays to be careful about sounding like a bitter old-timer complaining that things are not what they used to be. But in terms of the festival’s legendary competitiveness, which in turn fires the excitement, uncertainty and betting turnover, there are numbers to back it up. In addition to the increasing number of odds-on favourites, the mean price of all favourites at the meeting has dropped by a point in the past 10 years, from a shade above 4-1 in 2014 to just shy of 11-4 in 2023.
Some diminution of the festival’s competitiveness was always likely as it moved from 20 races over three days, in 2004, to 28 over four. But the past decade has also been marked by the increasing dominance of Irish trained runners in general, and the Willie Mullins stable above all. For the third season running, Ireland will have a majority of the runners. British stables, increasingly, are not even at the races.
The extent to which this all plays in to the apparent reluctance of 2022’s racegoers to repeat the experience a year later is hard to say. The overall quality of the runners at a modern festival is much higher than it was a quarter of a century ago and for any serious punter a winner is a winner, regardless of where it is trained.
But the attendance figures will be keenly scrutinised for any sign that the festival’s 35-year run of all-but unbroken progress has started to run out of steam. Perhaps last year was indeed a temporary blip and the week ahead will rekindle the public appetite for Cheltenham. At the same time, though, it may be worth recalling that eventually, even Godzilla was forced on to the retreat.
