Perhaps it is just recency bias but looking back at Cheltenham two days later, it is difficult to recall a Festival in the past quarter of a century at which the defining memories were so overwhelmingly positive.
Tony McCoy got a winner at his last Festival, and enjoyed a heartfelt send-off after the concluding race, which had been renamed in his honour. A long series of favourites won as the punters had hoped, Warren Greatrex showed how much it all means as he dissolved into tears after winning the World Hurdle, and though Annie Power took at least £50m-worth of four-timers with her when she fell at the last on Tuesday, she then got up, when the speed and manner of her departure meant that it could have been so much worse.
And then, as a grand final flourish, there was Coneygree’s victory in the Gold Cup, for a 10-horse stable that is steeped in National Hunt history. Mark Bradstock’s novice, the first to win the race for 41 years, not only recalled warm memories of Lord Oaksey, his breeder, and Captain Christy, the last novice to win, but immediately started the buildup to next year’s Gold Cup too. As Bradstock said: “If you look at the horses that have won [earlier in the week], next year’s Gold Cup is going to be pretty interesting.”
This was a Festival at which Willie Mullins saddled eight winners, a record and an outstanding achievement that represents nearly a third of the entire total. Yet still it did not feel like “The Mullins Festival” alone when everyone headed for home – and that may be a sign that while the Festival has changed in the past 20 years, it has not changed utterly.
In 1989, the total attendance at Cheltenham’s three-day Festival was 140,170, an average of just under 47,000 per day. Not shabby, for sure, but it also comprised a substantial number of the same people going every day. Last week the total was 248,521, and a 32% rise in the daily average to 62,130. That would have been enough to bump it up from sixth to fifth in Deloitte’s annual list of the best-attended sporting events in 2014, overtaking the Ryder Cup and bridging half the 32,000 gap to the (eight-day) ATP World Finals in fourth.
It will be a bitter disappointment if there is not a new record attendance at next year’s Festival too, when Cheltenham’s £45m redevelopment will be complete. There is still scope to increase the Thursday crowd, which crept above 60,000 for the first time this year, and a four-day sell out, which would take the total attendance past 270,000, is a realistic target.
Royal Ascot, which runs for five days, remains the best-attended meeting and has ambitions of its own to overtake the British Grand Prix and occupy second place behind Wimbledon in Deloitte’s list. But its average daily attendance of just under 60,000 is now behind Cheltenham’s, and the gap, while small, is likely to widen in the immediate future.
The switch to a four-day Cheltenham has also changed the make-up of the crowd, with more people attending for one or two days rather than the entire meeting. This is despite the track’s relative inaccessibility from the capital when compared to Ascot, which is under an hour from Waterloo by train and 15 minutes off the M25. Those new spectators, who have fallen in love with the Festival over the last quarter of a century, are potential racegoers at other jumping tracks, as well as recruiting sergeants for the Festival during the other 51 weeks of the year, and who may well bring even more of their friends next time.
Some complain that the Festival has become too important as if it might be possible to reduce its pre-eminence by some fixed amount and make it feel like the good old days again. Yet the popularity of Cheltenham has grown, and continues to grow, because what it has to offer to spectators is not just memorable and compelling, but uniquely so. That is ultimately to the benefit of racing as a whole, and National Hunt racing in particular.
