Cheltenham’s £45m revamp will be unveiled ahead of schedule next month, and now that the crowd capacity issues have been settled the debate the course has promised to start about whether the Festival should be extended to a fifth day will start in earnest.
The modern Cheltenham Festival transcends the sport in a way that the Derby, once the world’s most prestigious race, used to but the decline of the Epsom contest is a warning that nothing stands still. Racehorse ratings experts Timeform, whose latest Chasers & Hurdlers volume on the last jumps season is out this week, point to the Grand National as a prime example.
In a 16-page essay on the 2015 National winner Many Clouds, Timeform lament the fundamental changes to Aintree’s unique character which were carried out before the 2013 running. “The days when the Grand National field taking Becher’s Brook was one of the great sights in racing may have already passed into history, an example of an iconic sporting spectacle that feels permanent one day but can be gone the next,” states Timeform.
The number of fallers, jockeys being unseated and horses being brought down have been lower in the last three editions than nearly all the previous Grand Nationals in the 21st century but have the alterations been made at too high a cost?
Timeform, who have dubbed this the ‘plastic Grand National era’, recall that the National was in serious peril of disappearing altogether in the 1970s and early 80s and conclude: “The Grand National back then was a genuine article well worth fighting for but who, if the circumstances arise, is going to feel it is worth fighting to preserve an imitation, a ghost of the real thing?”
Meanwhile, changes to the Cheltenham Festival are inevitable in the wake of alterations to the buildings and the increased crowd numbers that can be accommodated. Royal Ascot have tagged on a Saturday extremely successfully and there is no reason why Cheltenham could not do so for the Festival, bringing in a new audience.
Whether that is achieved by adding another day remains to be seen but there must be a strong possibility of that or a switch away from a weekday Festival given the money spent on new facilities. Many within racing resisted the extension of the Cheltenham Festival before a fourth day was added, but there were a host of suggestions for additional races when the idea of a fifth day was mooted in the Racing Post during this year’s Festival. The idea gets short shrift from Timeform.
“Lobbying for the creation of a five-day Festival seems to be intensifying, but any such ideas must be resisted if the meeting is to retain its last shred of integrity as jumping’s championships. The creation of a fourth day in 2005 has already resulted in too much watering down, and a fifth day would create further opportunities for more of the good horses to avoid each other,” argue Timeform.
Tony McCoy’s surprise retirement was without doubt the biggest story of the jumps campaign and the former jockey gets an extended appreciation in the essay on Uxizandre, his final Cheltenham Festival winner, as well as featuring on the front of this new tome aboard Timeform’s horse of the year Don Cossack.
McCoy took the decision to quit after injury halted his aim to ride an unprecedented 300 winners in a season and there is a note of disquiet expressed in Chasers & Hurdlers about his hoodwinking of officials after he rode on when far from fully fit, before being forced to take three weeks off after breaking his dislocated collarbone.
McCoy said “in a way it was the worst failure and disappointment of my career” but Timeform state: “The British Horseracing Authority rightly has much stricter standards of fitness to ride to nowadays and there are very good reasons for that. Jockeys owe it to themselves to behave responsibly when they have an injury and trust in the expertise of the course doctors to make the right decision. The doctors first and foremost have a duty to enforce the BHA’s standards of fitness, regardless of the standing and reputation of the jockey involved.”
The BHA itself will find passages in the book’s introduction uncomfortable reading, specifically the criticism of the sport’s governing body’s slow response to Timeform’s revelation that various tracks were running races over the wrong distance and their dragging out of the case of the jockey Richie McGrath, who was eventually cleared, in contrast to what Timeform pointed to in a previous Racehorses annual was the BHA’s “undue haste in concluding the potentially much graver Godolphin doping scandal”.
Timeform are also unequivocal in their condemnation of what they label as the “scandalous” starting price returns for the latest Grand National. “The vast majority of those who bet on the National hardly think about horse racing again until the Grand National the following year,” point out Timeform, which adds: “Unfortunately, the major off-course bookmakers prey on the naivety of those once-a-year punters and take them for a ride, in line with the philosophy of the bandit Calvera in The Magnificent Seven that ‘if God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep!’
“The theoretical mark-up in favour of bookmakers on starting prices – the over-round – in the National was a disgraceful 165% (a figure in the 130s or low 140s would be acceptable given the field size). In theory, a punter had to stake £165 on the race to return £100, taking betting on racing’s biggest attraction into the territory of scratch cards and the National Lottery.”
Numerous other topics are put under the microscope, including the scale of the decline of jump racing in the north and the voiding of races owing to low sun, in the 1,000-plus pages covering the A–Z of the 8,758 runners from 2014-15 that ran in Britain plus the cream of the Irish crop.
Chasers & Hurdlers 2014/15 costs £75 and can be ordered online.
